World peace is possible. Like Alex Bellamy does in his recent book World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It), I am willing to suspend disbelief to move the quest beyond the realm of skepticism and fantasy. But, as my mother always told me—contra G. K. Chesterton—if something is worth doing, it is worth doing well. Therefore, if we want to bring about world peace, we need to address all the forms of violence and insecurity that threaten it.
Bellamy argues that the starting point for peace is a recognition of why wars and other types of organized violence happen.Footnote 1 He highlights three primary underlying reasons for why organized violence occurs: (1) humans are organized in different political groupings with contending perspectives; (2) war is useful or profitable to some; and (3) it is contagious, and a collective action problem with attaining peace therefore exists. Another major cause of war affects the previous three. That is, World Peace and other scholarly works on the causes of war overlook the violence perpetuated by patriarchal gender relations within and across groups, including the socialization of individuals and collective institutions that makes violence not only acceptable but normative and systemic.Footnote 2 Societies with more gender equal structures are overall less violent—both in terms of state-sanctioned violence against women and state engagement in war and conflict.Footnote 3 War and peace are, as Bellamy argues, human creations, and humans have much capacity for adaption and change.Footnote 4 Feminists make a similar and related claim—that the gender norms and identities of masculinity and femininity at the heart of the war system are socially and historically constructed—but they point to a different solution. The contribution of gender equality to peace is iterated in chapter 5 of Bellamy's book, “The State: Warmaker and Peacemaker,” but the organization of gender relations is not integral to the overall argument being made here about the nature of war and violence. From the perspective of “feminist peace,” that is a significant theoretical and empirical neglect.
Bellamy defines “peace” in the following way: “By ‘peace’, therefore, I mean the absence and prevention of war (international and civil) and the management of conflict through peaceful means, implying some form of legitimate civic order. By ‘world’ peace I mean the extension of these things globally.”Footnote 5 Such a definition is not without its problems, he acknowledges. Indeed, it is not. From the perspective of feminist peace, peace is more than the absence and prevention of war (international and civil). On this view one must be attentive to all the causes of insecurity, as well as to victims and survivors of violence and displacement. The problem is not just that we lack a shared understanding of peace,Footnote 6 or that we need to agree on what peace looks like. Rather, a critical problem is that our prevailing ways of conceptualizing and measuring peace focus too much on the absence of interstate and civil war. If we adopt a broader understanding of “social organization,” we see that such a narrow measurement does not account for all the violence that might be considered “organized,” violence that reflects a predictable and explicable pattern of violence by a group of perpetrators, and which has a basis in social structures (of gender inequality).
Our present understanding of peace is characterized by an overreliance on the “battlefield deaths” statistical measurement. Conceived of in the 1960s by the Peace Research Institute Oslo, this measure of conflict has stuck.Footnote 7 However, it fails to factor in other types of violence such that Bellamy, and others including Steven Pinker and Joshua Goldstein, can claim that “war is all but extinct in the Americas, the Caribbean, and Western Europe.”Footnote 8 For instance, inter alia, it does not capture physical violence occurring off of a conventional battlefield that may or may not result in death, including the killing of women by intimate partners, which the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) argues “is rarely spontaneous or random” and should be “examined as an extreme act on a continuum of gender-related killings that remain under-reported and too often ignored.”Footnote 9 It does not consider the significant injury, disease, and death due to unjust social structures, which are part of the organization of violence. It does not factor in the random, intermittent violence of terror and extremism not resulting in death or not coded as conflict-related that thus falls both outside of battlefield death–related annual thresholds for counting conflict and outside of statist frameworks for securing peace.Footnote 10 It does not cover the slow violence of climate change and climate-induced disasters resulting in deaths and displacement. For instance, a recent Oxfam report found that people are three times more likely to be internally displaced by climate-fueled disasters than by conflict.Footnote 11 The failure of the battlefield concept of war to account for these myriad harms and forms of systemic violence is biased against those individuals and groups who disproportionately experience such violence off the battlefield. These include women and girls, poor people, and disproportionately those living in developing nations. It is worth asking, as feminist scholars do, what peace looks like from the perspective of these marginalized actors, rather than from the perspective of the most powerful actors, such as those states wielding deadly arms.
Is it somehow worse to die as the result of a state-sanctioned mass atrocity than as the result of a systemic pattern of societal violence and displacement? As a result of genocide, say, versus domestic abuse, where statistics on the latter show that one woman is killed by her partner each week in Australia, a so-called peaceful country?Footnote 12 Even in Afghanistan, where violent conflict between Taliban and government forces persists following the withdrawal of United States and ISAF troops, statistics for 2016 show that 94 percent of all cases of violence against women occurred in the home. This included 277 killings, 12 extrajudicial killing cases, and 1,420 cases of acute physical violence, “indicating that the home is the most insecure place for women in Afghanistan.”Footnote 13 This evidence concurs with the UNODC global study on gender-related killing of women and girls, which finds that the home is the most likely place for a woman or girl to be killed, whether in Afghanistan or Australia. An average of 137 women across the world are killed every day by a partner or a family member, more than half of the 87,000 women reported killed in 2017.Footnote 14
Any vision of world peace must therefore grapple not only with war but also with continuums of violence and peace that extend from the home and community to the public spaces of international relations. As Bellamy writes, “There is also much to be said for the argument that militarism and war rest on foundations of patriarchy and what might be called ‘hyper-masculinity’. … Both war and patriarchy are manifestations of social violence.”Footnote 15 Feminists take this argument further, arguing that patriarchy is a form and a root cause of war—part of the “big” violence, the important violence, the violence around which the world system is structured.
So why do Bellamy and other scholars of peace and conflict reject a broader conception of organized violence despite an acknowledgment that there is a strong connection between patriarchy and war? In Bellamy's words, “To be a distinct and identifiable social condition, peace should be primarily understood as the absence of war—that is, the absence of organized group-level violence.”Footnote 16 Why is the quest for world peace predicated on a reified notion of war that does not include the types of violence most likely to affect more than half the world's population? The answer seems to be that this is mainly for pragmatic and methodological purposes. We can see this in several statements in World Peace. For instance, “if we define peace so broadly as to include virtually every aspect of human wellbeing then the problem of organized violence slips from view.”Footnote 17 Moreover, not even Galtung's concept of structural violence suggests that all aspects of human wellbeing should be included in a vision for peace.Footnote 18 But the problem of defining the absence of war and conflict as the absence of battlefield deaths and using this as the metric for peace, as does much of peace and conflict studies,Footnote 19 is that other types of violence and insecurity threatening peace will also slip from view. Neither the experience of war and violence nor the apparent end to them are typically the same for women as for men, as feminist research and advocacy has shown.Footnote 20 I would suggest therefore a conceptualization of peace that includes the elimination of a range of types of gender-based physical and nonphysical violence or threats already recognized by the United Nations,Footnote 21 as well as the additional types mentioned above, violent extremism and violent, climate-fueled displacement.Footnote 22
Similar to his previous statement, Bellamy also argues that “if peace is defined as everything, then it simultaneously becomes nothing or, rather, nothing specific.”Footnote 23 Again, this view is disputed by the continuum of violence and peace proposed here as the feminist conceptual framework. In order to realize peace, we need to understand all the types of violence that threaten it, even the types we do not yet know about and have not yet been able to adequately measure. If we separate out interstate and civil war from other types of violence that threaten peace and security, we will not learn what factors are actually associated with the absence of systemic violence, let alone with the presence of peace. It took a century-long peace movement led by women to expose the hidden violence against women and girls that occurs during war and in the periods before and after war as well, showing that ending a war does not effectively end the violence against women and girls.Footnote 24 That movement put gender equality and social and economic justice on the agenda for peace not just as precursors or preconditions but as themselves conditions and forms of peace. If the achievement of “peace” does not include the movement toward gender equality and social and economic justice within and across every group then the conditions for and the perpetration of domination and violence against women and girls and non-gender conforming individuals in particular will persist. This is no peace at all.
Furthermore, maintaining a narrower concept of peace and its correlates, we will also continue to overlook a key source of and resource for peace: differently-situated women and girls. Increasingly, we are seeing young women drawing on their experiences of violence outside of war and conflict to emerge as leaders in popular protests against corrupt regimes, material insecurity, sectarianism, hatred, and various types of violence and brutality in their communities. Think of the recent movements in Algeria, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and Libya. One notable example is Alaa Saleh, the young woman who in 2019 became the symbol of the Sudanese revolution against president Omar al-Bashir. In Sudan, this revolution “from below,” ordinary women—from academics and housewives to lawyers and street vendors—played a central role protesting en masse against the regime based on their experiences of genital mutilation and early marriage. During the protests these women and girls experienced systematic sexual assaults by the military. And while they were among the visible leaders of the Sudanese protest movement, in the aftermath, with the transition to a new regime, their political leadership has been sidelined. To enable the sort of peace envisioned in World Peace, and to encourage more and more agents of peace—women and girls, boys and men—we need an inclusive conception of the violence and insecurity that most threatens people's sense of peace and mobilizes them to act.
Finally, Bellamy considers it crucial to distinguish peace from other social goods to prevent falling into a trap of circular thinking, where peace can only be achieved with peaceful conditions and so on. Without such a distinction, he argues, “the fundamental question of ending large-scale organized violence becomes just one of a series of ‘mega-sized’ problems to address, its fate tied to that of other political agendas.”Footnote 25 This is true. But whereas Bellamy sees this as resulting in circular thinking, I would call it holistic thinking. And this is exactly the insight of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations to be achieved by 2030: that peace, development, and sustainability are intrinsically connected and each is essential for their mutual achievement. This framework is also consensual and the basis for international cooperation.Footnote 26 Thus, would it not be better to be asking how we can make progress on all seventeen SDGs simultaneously, noting their interactive effects, rather than to ask whether peace is distinct from other social and political goods? World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It) proposes categorical thinking when it is holistic thinking that is surely what is called for.
Engendering Peace
Despite his skepticism toward circular thinking (which, again, I would call holistic thinking), Bellamy argues that “if we can make progress towards gender equality, we necessarily make progress towards peace.”Footnote 27 Chapter 5 of World Peace explores the paradoxical role of the state in making war and building peace, and here gender equality is introduced as a concept connected to world peace. However, equality among women, men, and identities not defined by binary gender is not a preliminary condition for world peace as laid out in the final chapter, which advances categorical thinking on how to achieve it. Gender-equal societies are seen as “far more peaceful than patriarchal societies,” with the great majority of states and societies being patriarchal ones, which “make societies more militaristic and war-prone.”Footnote 28 Bellamy goes as far as to state that “war persists in part because it is enabled and facilitated by how we manage relations between genders.”Footnote 29 We must understand, however, that gender-based discrimination conducive to violence could be itself a threat to peace and even a form of organized violence, as in the “war against women” discourse in the United States, which refers to systematic attacks on women's basic sexual and reproductive freedoms by right-wing political groups. We also see this in the worldwide backlash against women's rights by governments from Turkey (where having an abortion puts you on the list for suspected terrorism) to the Philippines (where agencies delivering disaster relief cannot also provide contraception) to the United States (where the global gag rule has ensured no American foreign aid can support women's reproductive rights). The limited conception of what constitutes organized war and violence in World Peace seems to contradict its recognition of the patriarchal nature of war and, therefore, the feminist roots of peace.
Some innovative recent research, however, both identifies and quantifies the connections between the gender norms that regulate violent conflict and peace. For instance, studies have shown that male honor codes are a gender norm that shapes both men's and women's behavior; wherein male family members are expected to protect female family members to uphold their honor and the honor of the family unit. In societies where such an honor code is still operative, men are empowered to retaliate with violence against any person who threatens the sanctity of a female family member, including the woman herself if she transgresses social codes of conduct by, for example, leaving the home without a male guardian or interacting with a male who is not a family member (outside of marriage). In one study, men who subscribe to such an honor code and oppose gender equality were found to be four times more likely to use violence in political uprisings than those not embracing an honor code.Footnote 30 The upshot of this study is that it found that gender equality essentially has a pacifying effect on male honor culture and relatedly on the use of overtly political violence.
While the honor code has historically enabled male violence inside and outside of traditional conceptions of war, in some societies the gender norm of female seclusion has also historically constrained women's direct participation in violence.Footnote 31 In today's changing world, however, women's frustrations with an unequal, discriminatory, and gendered social order may mobilize them both to perpetrate violence directly and indirectly (through support for violence online and social media recruitment of fighters and logistical support for acts of violent extremism) and to oppose violence (such as through mass mobilization in social movements). Above all, if conflicts are to be resolved peacefully, pathways must be found to shift these gender norms and we must include gender-based violence as part of our definition of war and organized violence. Gender equality is significant and far-reaching, as Bellamy agrees,Footnote 32 and therefore it warrants status as a precondition of peace.Footnote 33 However, without an urgency and a call to action, resource-constrained states will be unlikely to “redirect funds from the military to support the advancement of gender equality.”Footnote 34 As Cynthia Enloe reminds us: “Later … is a patriarchal time zone.”Footnote 35
To achieve world peace, Bellamy tells us, “Each state and society should promote and protect gender equality,”Footnote 36 but we must go even further than this at a global level to achieve a feminist peace. Discriminatory gender norms are root causes of violence and they promote the acceptance and spread of violence by encouraging militarized masculinities and silent femininities. The reality is that gendered violence persists and often even increases after a formal cessation to civil war or international conflict, a feature that can contribute to recidivism. If gender norms are not addressed as causal factors in these types of conflicts as well as a form of violence in themselves, then the conditions will be ever present for the recurrence of violence and resumption of conflict. This should be done, in part, by making sure that plans for peace devised in elite political deals and broader peace processes include women's participation and that they ensure support for women's rights and gender equality.Footnote 37 Without the achievement of gender equality as a priority, the stability that any “world peace” achieves will be precarious and may only apply to certain spaces, to some types of violence and not others, and to particular groups: men more than women and groups with access to arms and political representation more than those without. The blueprint in World Peace recognizes that “sustainable peace can only be achieved if the basic building blocks of our societies are reorganized to better support it.”Footnote 38 Yet, as this essay has discussed, eliminating discriminatory gender norms and gender-based violence within and across states, whether during war or peacetime, is continually overlooked in the fields of international relations and peace and conflict studies as a first strike in our quest for peace. Perhaps this is because such violence is hidden in plain sight, too obvious, too pervasive to have its elimination seem relevant?
It may not be controversial to state that gender equality is a foundation of world peace. But what does that actually mean and how will we get there? As noted at the outset of this essay, Bellamy's work identifies the major forces that give rise to war—authoritarianism, nationalism, racism, populism, and protectionism—and the various states that are marshalling these forces.Footnote 39 But it overlooks that all these forces are connected by sexism and misogyny. From the research that I and my colleagues at Monash University's Gender, Peace and Security Centre have conducted in four countries in two global regions—Asia and North Africa—we have learned that, for instance, misogynistic attitudes toward women and support for violence against women are crucial and overlooked factors in propelling people to also support violent extremist groups and causes.Footnote 40 The United Nations Secretary-General recognized this connection when he stated that “there is a troubling commonality in terrorist attacks, extremist ideologies and brutal crimes: the violent misogyny of the perpetrators.”Footnote 41
It is only when we understand this that we can understand why, for example, recent research shows that the peace deals in which women act as negotiators, mediators, and participants are more lasting.Footnote 42 This is not because gender equality has an influence on cultural practices and attitudes and, consequently, on state behavior; rather it is, as Bellamy argues, because “gender equality necessarily involves more diffused and inclusive forms of decision-making, in which a wider range of perspectives and experiences of violence are brought to the table.”Footnote 43
There and Back Again
Breaking free of the constraints of the last century's intellectual boundaries, I suggest that a narrow understanding of peace as merely the absence of organized violence does not engender the kind of nuanced and rich understanding of human history and human relations needed to bring an end to the structural and physical violence that remains pervasive worldwide. Inspired by the spirit in which Alex Bellamy's book is written, this essay calls for further research, debate, and activism on the conditions and imperative for world peace. I strongly agree with Bellamy that “by itself, however, the outlawing of aggressive war does nothing to inhibit civil war—the most common form of war in the twenty-first century thus far”Footnote 44 or to limit the conduct of other forms of violence such as gender-based violence.
A problem with the broader feminist conception of violence proposed in this essay is not that it is unwieldy or engenders circular thinking about peace, but that our current approaches are limited in their capacity to analyze and measure different types of violence and their relationships to one another. This is partly due to our inherited statist and patriarchal frameworks for understanding war and violence, which have empowered certain research methodologies, such as quantification and statistical modelling, and the study of certain variables, such as deaths at the hands of armed parties when easily reported and able to be counted. The dearth of feminist perspectives in global debates has prevented us from seeing how violence against and harm to women occurs during periods of both “war” and “peace,” not only in households at the hands of domestic partners but also at a global level through entrenched systems of structural injustice—in the global economy, for example.Footnote 45 To understand the possibilities for world peace, we must, in sum, understand the varieties of violence and harm that threaten peace. And to sustain peace we must address the harmful identities, ideologies, and social dynamics that support violence in every society.
