The Pluralism Project at Harvard University

Women and Public Policy Programme
John F Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Presentation for Panel

"Perspectives on Peace"

I am grateful to Gowher Rizvi, Sugata Bose and Swanee Hunt for this opportunity to be with this group.

I confess that it is not a good time for me to find a useful, interesting and creative way of engaging in a discussion on peace. - Many have spoken on war and peace and some of the names are such that it seems one cannot add. There is Noam Chomsky, there is Arundati Roy - to talk of only a few; and then there are the hundreds and thousands of emails that we have all received, leading us to articles, letters to participate in mobilisations, signature campaigns, marches and so on. But my state of mind is one of numbness as Empire, I suggest, has not been able to strike back. I think there is need for us to retrace journeys both of intellect and action.

Another inhibitor, newer, - is one's own lack of interest in being heard or discussing with a US audience . What for? One feels like asking. Earlier there was definitely a prestige and other values in belonging or relating to some of these citadels - - power and quality was here in the US, and it was a magnet . To day it seems unfortunate that we did not see that some of that easy riding that we got used to, fed into an accumulation of privilege and power, perhaps leading to the current overbearing insularity and arrogance of the USA.

I want to bring up for discussion three somewhat unrelated works or points and events which are related to perspectives for peace building or unbuilding.

One is the recently concluded conference that we have come out.

The second is the findings of the research I am doing for a chapter which I call "War and Peace", in a volume which attempts to write the intellectual history of the UN

And the third is my own musings about the situation in India.

I am hoping that at least one of them might be of interest to you for a discussion. The running hypothesis is that knowledge has not been absorbed and put to use, that it has been bypassed Another not a hypothesis but what could be called a finding is that outcomes have not been as intended , the link is obvious. Thus to use the current language of intellectuals, I have no "road map" coming out of the "conversations".

I will take up the book chapter first. The work in progress, the book I am now writing is part of the United Nations Intellectual History Project, a project which hopes to bring out 14 volumes each on a different theme. My theme is Gender. I am to trace the history of ideas which engaged the UN — 50 years and world wide - in its coverage. In the chapter called "War and Peace" I review the thinking and participation of women in the UN's work on peace safe guarding and peace building (www.unhistory.org).

I was devastated, depressed, disgusted, angry, immobilised by the learning. Women out of their lived experience as well intellect, as well as something that we could call the ethics emerging out of lived experience, - whether it was Elise Boulding in the United States or Alva Myrdal in Sweden or Mothers for Peace in Sri Lanka or Lysistrata of ancient Greece or Swanee Hunt - have not only been standing for peace, but women have been explaining why it is important not to wage war but to find ways of overcoming, negotiating, resolving, dissolving conflict. Concepts like peace, as not only the absence of war but the presence of justice, or absence of inequality were advocated by women. The linking of peace to development and the shifting of the concept of security from military to human, - now au courant with commissions and studies, - were all uncovered and dedicatedly advocated even at the highest levels of power by women, from as far back as the early part of the century, apart from within the UN . Stories abound about individual women who worked to persuade

I am rediscovering the value of Alva Myrdal's work and conviction that there could be no peace without disarmament - Can you imagine what a difference it would have made to today as well as to our regions and our budgets, if there had been total disarmament and not only asymmetrical application of the rule of dismantling weapons of mass destruction? And she saw this long ago — from the early 1960s (as her country's representative to the UNO's political committee) and yet her efforts did not make it happen. Women identified and led and continue to lead the campaigns against small arms and landmines. The Women's Caucus of International Action Network on Small Arms played a key role in the UN conference on the issue in July 2001. It reveals deep knowledge, analysis and farsightedness - the understanding of the perniciousness of war not only on children and women as victims, but on the political ethos, the ethics, the effect war has on creating jingoism, perpetuating gender stereotyping such as maleness as heroic, warriors - have been signalled by women. (1)

I found the same story whichever theme I studied, be it development, Human rights , organisational modes - cannot say also work, as there has been some movement forward in that area.

The engagement of women in any schema - intellectual legal or institutional I found broadens that concept and also make it inclusive. It enables the aspirations of other than women . Extraordinary illuminations whether one traces the notion of equality, equity, poverty, work, - women had the most significant ideas and worked hard to have them listened to, for purposes that were broader than their own emancipation. But the outcome is that they have not been absorbed or only partially and often in a "corrupted" or distorted manner. Leading to a question which resounds from women every where — i.e. all corners (and class) of the world. Should we have engaged at all? Even as recently as in Afghanistan or Iraq which seemed to offer an opportunity for the learning of the previous 50 years to be translated into action, we find that women are not considered as people who specifically and specially be incorporated in the pre war dialogues or the post war settlement arrangements, even by the UN and its agencies.

The barrier does not seem to be a glass ceiling, but some kind of hard rock,- a sound barrier where the intellection of women in such applications remains "invisible" or unheard. A refusal to take it into account.

The history that I am writing seems to reveal that there is an incapacity in us to learn from the knowledge that we ourselves create — an incapacity to absorb that knowledge in a collective form, to be able to withstand the ugliness that is over powering the world I suggest entirely due to our own fault.

My second reference point is the Pluralism Project. This project, led by a woman Prof. Diana Eck, a feminist, again tries to show a way on how religion whose ugly face we tend to see now as a divider and conflict creator, can be seen as a benign presence or be converted into a benign presence by reconstructing its value and trying to build bridges across its divides. I suggest, - with due apologies to Diana Eck if this is a misinterpretation, that it has taken the language of politics where the concept of pluralism is now taking greater value and acceptance, perhaps more than secularism, - and applied it to the landscape of religions: -so that the idea could accommodate and celebrate or give positive values to multiple religions Thus this project and the Women, Religion, and Social Change II, which was a women's conference, could be seen as a peace builder

Generalising now, I suggest that we, e.g. in India "the little before midnights children", (taking Salman Rushdie's, 'Midnights children' i.e. those born in 1947, the year of India's Independence) let down this world fully. If today George Bush and the American State can overpower every counter force, - public opinion even in their own country and worldwide censure, and UN Security Council's unwillingness, even three big powers' unwillingness, and yet think of going to war, we realise how we have neglected our political sphere. We did not enable other poles to develop in the world. When the Non Aligned Movement was set up by people like Nehru and Nasser, in it was to offer that counter point to the Soviet-US two blocs. The ex-colonial countries could have come together to form one economic and political block, they could in fact have formed a resistance, both outside and inside the UN against the US. We trashed the South Commission led by Julius Nyerere. I was a member of that commission and it offered a clear road map for a South Union like the European Union.

Our generation knew that democratic politics, electing leaders, participating in movements which will clean up leadership and representation, such as eligibility criterion for selecting persons to go into political leadership, and have accountability was important. But my generation has generated leaders who are self centred, whose vision is so narrow, who would not think of uniting in numbers against such brutality arrogance and selfishness.

Similarly, you take environment. In India when we read about bottled water, and its pollutedness today, its not so much the bottled water, it is the water from which it is bottled and that is the subsoil water and that has been dirtied by pesticides. In fact my children and your grand children are already infected with pesticide and in many parts of India, mothers milk, has already got cyanide. We knew that we were polluting the environment with pesticides, with plastic, since when we were in school. But we just kept walking along blinkered. As a result, we are leaving the world in a much greater mess for our children than it has ever been.

Our generation is a disgrace - normally I tend to speak more positively and enthusiastically about how women are the only source in the world which can clean it up and transform it and perhaps that is something I would also like to believe in today. But right now with so much inequality, hunger, injustice, types of war, it is difficult to celebrate.

In trying to look forward it is so easy to slip into a support of public campaigns or say what is the interpretation of peace for poor women, and talk of human security; but I feel skeptical about the fruitfulness of that pursuit.

In India many campaigns are being launched, including a boycott of American and British goods worldwide. But given the kind of societies that have got bred since the last 10 years since globalisation, I do not see that campaign becoming what it was when we boycotted South African goods. That was a time when India actually refused to give visas to anyone who wanted to go to South Africa, and if you had been to South Africa, your passport was cancelled as persona non grata for India.

There was a community in India led by leaders who were not frightened about their borders, but more frightened about injustice. Having been the leaders of the freedom struggle who could "stand up", and the country at large felt that they were 'right'.

But today there is an emerging vibrant and almost homogenous world community which is interconnected and globalised and feeds on that interconnectivity. This global society has got caught in its own web of lifestyle related to consumption and opportunity, to the point of turning away from the more multiple layered inter dependent, and more moral - within India, national connectivities, that communities had earlier. This neo global community is called, for example in India, 'the middle class'. It feeds on itself, it is a vote bank, it determines policy, it attracts media, it is the face of India now - and this face is used politically to reveal modernity, momentum, dynamism 'emerging as a world power', Leaders in IT, nuclear power, 6% rate of growth types of sentiments. Books have been written applauding this wonderful class, they are identified as the crucial factor for sustaining democracy not only in India, but I used to hear this in South Africa. Oh if we had a middle class, informed and capable of handling the globalised world, we could manage our new country?

However I suggest that the emergence of this amoral, unattached to roots, self propelled class of people, - men and women, - circulating in the "other economy", - the global goods and services and opportunities economy, has distorted the earlier however faulted ethic, moral concerns and impulses, political and social intimacy with deprivation, injustice, inequality. The corporate is the icon - not the public service work, or constructive work as Gandhiji used to call it. In turn, corporate feeds conservatism. Whether it is in religion, a subject with which I have been engaged in the last few days at Harvard, or in social attitudes and political responses

It would be difficult to turn the attention of this self propelled group to deny itself the pleasures of global life styles, to boycott and thereby endure some deprivation, - even to believe that it can be a force to dismantle the economic power of the invading coalition nations, to believe in old fashioned political configurations like the NAM or the South Commission which talked of building other centres of countervailing power.

We are in the precarious and almost rotted stage where from the bottom through the middle - to the top in all sectors - politics, administration, business, academia, civil society - we are blocked. We are engaged in ways which have no connection to the spirit of social change for social justice.

We need to retrospect.