That’s How Women Do Peace: Feminism, Nationalism and the Cyprus Imbroglio
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Despite recurrent rounds of UN-supported peace negotiations, Cyprus remains divided along ethnic lines since 1974, while women and issues of gender have always been excluded from the negotiation table. In my recent IFPJ article, I examine how women challenge this exclusion and strive for peace, in a nationalist and feminism-resistant context that is, nonetheless, progressively exposed to transnational flows of ideas and practices that relate to women’s agency and peacebuilding.
I argue that when critically employed by local actors, national and transnational discourses and paradigms prompt feminist politics of peace.
I interviewed representatives of feminist and women’s groups in 2009 and 2017 to identify changes in approaches and opinions from the early stages of civil society mobilization—that the island’s 2004 EU accession facilitated—until today. My study found that women’s engagement with national projects has enabled some of them to enter the political structures and subsequently push for and gain women-specific rights and gender-oriented policy implementation. In this way, they helped initiate a process of reconfiguration of gender power relations, women’s agency and peacebuilding processes. This progressively allowed explicitly feminist groups to create further disruptive opportunities and to successfully shape them into a feminist politics of gender that transcends ethnic and other divisions. I argue that, important in this process, is the employment of transnational peace paradigms.
Step 1: Strategically Employing Nationalism to Enter the Scene
Members of the GAT meet with the UN Secretary General’s Special Adviser on Cyprus, Mr. Espen Barth Eide, on November 27, 2014.
Since the politics of nationalism have been the predominant politics in Cyprus, it is principally through national struggles that women’s voices become to emerge. Women have strategically employed their men-directed involvement in national projects to enter the political arena and push for gender equality. This did not suffice to dismantle nationalist and essentialist gender discourses. Nevertheless, it created opportunities for disrupting them and highlighted the nuanced and complex relation between strategic essentialist and anti-essentialist approaches to women’s empowerment. Even so, unless women understand their empowerment as a non-hierarchical collective process, the nationalism-feminism relationship becomes dangerous. When nationalism appears to promote feminism, it may benefit some women at the cost of the group and further limit women’s agency while leaving a number of inequalities intact.
Step 2: Bringing in Feminism and Transnational Tools to Reconceptualize Peace and Gender
Because of the country’s historical legacies, the political has been narrowly conceptualized and the momentum that generated feminist movements elsewhere has been missed in Cyprus. Nonetheless, the lack of a feminist activism tradition does not mean that feminist women’s agency is impossible.
This is a time of stalemate of the peace negotiations and of local and transnational economic and sociopolitical changes that necessitate a reworking of the meaning of, and interconnections between, gender, citizenship and justice. In this context, women’s groups seek to move beyond the mere incorporation of women’s perspectives into political processes to the elimination of all social divisions and hierarchies, through the employment of transnational discourses and paradigms.
One such group is the Gender Advisory Team (GAT). The core principle of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325) is states’ responsibility towards ensuring the inclusion of women in all aspects of public life. Using it as a tool, GAT pays attention to local particularities and treats gender equality not merely as a matter of top-down implementation of external directives and policies, but as a matter of intercommunal grassroots efforts. For example, being aware of the limitations of UNSCR 1325 as an exemplar of liberal peacebuilding—e.g., it makes no mention to the gender regime that causes women’s exclusion from peace processes—GAT uses it as a tool in the transition from liberal to radical postliberal peace. The novelty in its approach is that beyond arguing that a gender-equality perspective is necessary for creating a more just and diverse democratic society, it also understands, and works based on, the premise that the transition to peace must pass through and surpass liberal values. One of GAT’s propositions that testify to its radical feminist approach relates to its recommendations to the negotiators. In them, it challenges the logic of ethnic separation and calls for untying rights of citizenship—like rights of residence, work and movement—from the ethnically-determined act of voting. Therefore, its recommendations, strategies, values and proposed worldview form the basis of a contemporary feminist politics that aims to make the advantages of feminism pervasive and permanent.
It has been argued that transnational discourses and paradigms of activism conceal local particularities’ subordination by transnational structures and the hierarchical relations between “metropolises” and “peripheries”. However, a closer look reveals that they are not monolithic or inflexible. The possibilities of feminist and women’s agency increase, as long as local actors manage to employ them in ways that do not violate local women’s needs and as long as scholarship and activism inform each other through continuous constructive dialogue.
Read the full article here: Feminism in Cyprus: Women’s Agency, Gender and Peace in the Shadow of Nationalism
Nayia Kamenou is a VC2020 Senior Lecturer in the School of Applied Social Sciences at De Montfort University, Leicester. Her research broadly focuses on gender and sexuality.
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