Peace through women’s eyes

“We are all prisoners of a masculine representation of war, which stems from purely masculine perceptions, expressed in masculine words, in the silence of women”, says Svetlana Aleksievič. No one has narrated war like her, for she is a tireless collector of women’s stories and testimonies, which become books through her “polyphonic writing” that won the Belarusian investigative journalist, essayist and oral historian the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015. From Berlin where she lives, the journalist and writer gave a long interview to Ritanna Armeni and Lucia Capuzzi for Women Church World, who in this issue write about war because the female perspective on war is not only a gender issue, but a crucial resource for the future of humanity.

This month, we enter the third year of the Russian invasion of Ukraine; there are over fifty conflicts active throughout the world; and, meanwhile in the Middle East, one crisis leads to another.  The alarming fact is that in the last year the percentage of female victims has doubled compared to the previous decade; it is as if the world, which appears to be sinking into a spiral of violence, is trying to stifle the very voices that could point to a way out.

Vivian Silver’s tragic story represents the most harrowing paradox of the relationship between women and war in these dark years. At seventy-four years old, this Israeli-Canadian peace activist was murdered terribly in the Be’eri kibbutz on October 7, 2023.  Vivian was the very woman who had dedicated her life to building bridges between Israelis and Palestinians. Her end illuminates a fundamental truth: women are not simply passive victims of conflict, but bearers of an alternative vision of dispute resolution, the result of a historical experience of non-violent resistance that has forged different instruments of confrontation with power.

Patriarchy has made war its supreme expression, while turning difference into hierarchy and confrontation into oppression. However, precisely from the experience of marginalization, women have developed a counter-cultural intelligence: diplomacy instead of prevarication, creativity instead of destruction, mediation instead of imposition. The numbers confirm this intuition. As the UN notes, even though women represent only 10 per cent of global negotiators, the presence of women in negotiations increases the likelihood of lasting peace by 35 per cent.

The lesson we learn from Vivian Silver, like the everyday and literary testimony of Svetlana Aleksievič, remind us that peace is not simply the absence of conflict, but the ability to imagine and build different forms of coexistence.