University of Nottingham: “Social Sciences: Different Approaches, Different Solutions?” July 1st 2016
When people think about women from Myanmar/Burma,[1] they will probably call to mind the Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the opposition party who spent more than twenty years under house arrest for her fight against the country’s die-hard dictatorship. Daughter of the national independence hero Aung San, she was able to exercise her legacy and leadership skills to successfully mobilize people and advocate with the government towards a democratic Myanmar (Harriden, 2012). The image of this powerful woman, however, contradicts the marginalization of the majority of women leaders and activists, especially those belonging to ethnic and religious minorities (Hedström, 2015a). I maintain that their ‘marginal voices’ have been dismissed, spoken for and, therefore, ‘colonized’ by male-dominated élites with regard to important issues concerning the country. One such issue is national security, a domain which is particularly problematic due to the almost seventy-year-old ethnic and religious conflict (Wilson, 2016).
In this paper I am analysing the process through which the ‘marginal voices’ are ‘colonized’ in what I would call a ‘male-streaming’ approach to security. I will illustrate how this could be counteracted by starting from women’s experiences and perspectives as also suggested by various theorists of Feminist Security Studies. I am using narrative approaches with the aim of ‘decolonizing’ their voices specifically with two tools: the human rights reports produced by multi-ethnic or ethnic-based women’s organizations and the autobiographical narratives of women coming from different ethnic background.
I am providing a brief overview of the ethnic conflict in Myanmar and then I am illustrating the ‘male-streaming’ approach and its ‘colonizing’ effect on women’s voices. Then I will proceed illustrating how narrative approaches can ‘decolonize’ women’s voices. In the conclusion I will discuss possible benefits of listening to women’s voices.
A long history of dictatorship has marked Myanmar from 1962 and it came to an end in April 2016 with the inauguration of the first democratically-elected institutions in more than fifty years. Consequently, Myanmar politics has been characterized by a militarized and male-oriented leadership which always promoted xenophobic policies towards ethnic and religious minorities, in a country that counts 135 officially recognized ethnic groups (Steinberg, 2010). A conflict between the Tatmadaw (the national army) and different ethnic armed groups has been plaguing the country since its independence obtained in 1948 (Smith, 1991). The conflict has been interested the border regions of the country populated by ethnic minorities (show map, may be from storia delle donne). Numerous ceasefires have been signed over the years but they have been always unstable and continuously broken. A second kind of conflict has been involved Muslim religious minorities who were targeted by attacks by members of Buddhist populations from 2012-2014 in different parts of the country. The most affected community is the Rohingya, a Muslim minority living in Rakhine state, who counts thousands of displaced people and sees a mass migration through life-threating journeys by boat (…).
The Myanmar government has been always very concerned in keeping the country together considering its multi-ethnic nature. It has always acted in order to contain or neutralize the threats to the disintegration of the unity of the nation represented by the ethnic armed groups. These were formed shortly after the independence from the British colony because of unfulfilled promises of autonomy and self-determination (Gravers, 1993). The government has pursued its security strategy by increasing the attacks on ethnic militia and targeting ethnic civilian populations considered potential supporters of ethnic armed groups. Over decades ethnic people have been victim of various human rights violations such as forced labour, torture, arbitrary killing and arrest, and land confiscation among others (Women’s League of Burma – WLB, 2015). Moreover, the conflict has always had a strong economic dimension. Attacks were often aimed at gaining territorial control over economic strategic areas (rich of mineral resources or concerned with development projects such as dam and oil and pipelines). Over the years, the strategy of the Myanmar government was to persuade ethnic armed groups to sign various ceasefire agreements without any further settlement of political issue, fact that also cause the continual resumption of fighting. With regards to the conflict between Muslim and Buddhist populations, the government has endorsed a stance of some extremist monks who see Muslim populations as a threat to the state because of their ‘secret’ plan to invade the country (Beech, 2013). The government has consequently acted policies aimed to contain Muslim populations by segregating them in internally displaced camps with no freedom of movement and by acting discriminatory policies restricting marriage and birth (…). Notably absent from peace negotiation tables, and from any political discussion about the sectarian violence, are the majority of women who have been sidelined not only by government and military officials but also by the leaders of their own ethnic groups (Hedström, 2015a). Women have been invariably represented by different institutions exclusively as carriers of their culture and with a role limited to the domestic sphere; they have been just treated as victims of ethnic tensions or as docile supporters of different factions and therefore as agentless subjects. Besides being in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, this situation is also in sharp contrast with the crucial and unceasing contribution that women’s organizations have been provided for the advancement of democracy and the promotion of peace culture in Myanmar (Hedström, 2015a). Conversely to what is dictated by the UN Women and Security agenda, to be mainstreamed are the interests and strategies of male-dominated institutions creating what I would call a ‘male-streaming’ approach to security.[2] The ‘male-streaming’ materializes in the imposition of one single version of security, the one that reflects the interest of the dominant group: a male-dominated and militarized elite belonging to the majority ethnic group, the Bamar. The ‘male-streaming’ approach is operating as a form of ‘colonization’. ‘Colonization’ is here understood in Chandra Mohanty’s terms as “a relation of structural domination, and suppression – often violent – of the heterogeneity of the subject(s) in question” (Mohanty, 1984: 336). To be ‘colonized’ are what I call the ‘marginal voices’ of Myanmar women represented by women who because of their ethnic or religious identity, political orientation or lack of connections with armed groups cannot effectively influence the peacebuilding negotiations. With ‘marginal voices’ I am particularly referring to ethnic women who are active in the civil society through different means.
The approach to security promoted by the Myanmar government tends to follow a mainstream approach to security that has been criticized by various feminist scholars within Feminist Security Studies and Feminist International Relations. Ann Tickner (1992) in her seminal work Gender and International Relations has questioned a state-centered understanding of security which conceives it as absence of threats and preservation of state sovereignty (Tickner, 1992, 1997, 2014; Wibben, 2011). Feminist IR academics have also criticized the fact that dominant security narratives impose their vision of security as the only valid one excluding alternative narratives (Wibben, 2011; Delehanty & Steele, 2009). Therefore, as has suggested Annick Wibber, “traditional security narratives fix their meaning” (Wibben, 2011: 66); this is to say that its propagation and replication over time have cemented the way security is acknowledge and performed (Wibben, 2011). To disrupt its meaning it is therefore necessary to produce alternative narratives. One of the instrument is deploying what Cynthia Enloe (2004:3) has called a “feminist curiosity”, that is to say that we need to take people and women’s lives as referents of our study instead of states. If we look from the perspective of these new referents we can see for example that the state instead being the protector of people’s security, it often represents one of their major threats not least through acts of sexual violence (Stern, 2006).
The production of alternative understanding of security starting from women’s everyday experience is therefore central in order to disrupt the dominant narrative (Ackerly, Stern & True, 2006; Tickner, 2006; Wibben, 2011) and therefore to ‘decolonize’ Myanmar women’s voices. However, according to Wibben to change the meaning of security, “it is not only enough to propose different contents but the form of security narratives also needs to be tackled” (Wibben, 2011:44). Feminist theorists have privileged qualitative methods “that allow women to document their own experiences in their own terms” (Tickner, 2006:41). These included ethnographic field work through interviews containing for example personal narratives on life history or war experience (Nordstrom, 1997; Stern, 2005; D’Costa, 2006). In the choice of my methods I have privileged those ones which in my opinion were able to communicate women’s agency. I have consequently followed what Jacoby (2006) calls “self-presentation”. Jacoby, who used interviews with open-ended questions, suggested that for the researcher to understand how subjects express their agency it would be necessary to consider how they decide to frame their own agenda and how they wished to be represented. Moreover, if deploying a “feminist curiosity” as suggested by Enloe (2004:3) means listening to women attentively and taking them seriously, then I do believe that this curiosity should also encourage feminist academics to pay attention also to the tools that women themselves have chosen as theorizing subjects on security and peace. I have privileged two sources through which have expressed their ideas either collectively – in the case of women’s organizations reports, or individually – in the case of autobiographical stories. Through a multiplicity of women’s narratives and a display of women’s agency, these tools could be able to counteract the single and indisputable ‘male-streaming’ approach of security and its homogenizing power over ethnic women’s identity.
The reports that I have analysed are discussing various conflict-related issues through the documentation of various human rights violations with most of these reported concerning sexual violence by the military. These reports were published in English language and produced by multi-ethnic and ethnic based women’s organizations most of them based in exile and belonging to the umbrella organization Women’s League of Burma (Thailand). The autobiographical accounts are from individual women from different ethnic and religious backgrounds who experienced war and militarization in different forms; some of them are migrant workers or refugees, some others are politically active within women’s or youth organizations with the majority of them not having prominent positions. The selected narratives are contained in two editions of Women’s Voices Series published by the organization I was working for, the Bangkok-based ALTSEAN – Burma, and specifically from Burma: Women’s Voices for Peace (2010) and Burma: Women’s Voices for Hope (2007) and from the autobiography Little Daughter of Zoya Phan, an ethnic Karen who fled the war and who works in London as Campaigns Manager for Burma Campaign UK. Autobiographies are complementary to women’s organizations reports because they present a wider array of perspectives that sometimes enrich and other times partially contradicts the collective positions exposed in human rights reports.
The ‘marginal voices’ contained in the women’s organizations’ reports and autobiographies have demonstrated that peace and security cannot be attained through the elimination of threats and the mere cessation of hostilities. It is probably not a surprise that instead of security, ethnic women are mostly talking about ‘insecurities’ term that I use to show the contrast with and the paradoxes of national security in the form which is advanced by the government . According to women’s organizations, security is hampered by violence perpetrated by the state in form of both of direct and structural violence. In fact, as documented by women’s organizations one of the main threats to women’s security is the national army, the Tatmadaw, which in the pursuit of national security goals, has engaged in acts of direct violence against ethnic populations (considered potential supporters of ethnic armed groups) including sexual violence against ethnic women. Insecurities are aggravated by forms of structural violence through the lack of welfare provisions, such as health and education and access to livelihood due to the excessive prioritization of military expenditures (WLB, 2000; WoB, 2000; WLB, 2004; WLB, 2006). Moreover, women’s organizations in various reports have dedicated a lot of attention to an intersectional analysis to demonstrate how the intersection of different axes of difference in particular gender, ethnicity and political affiliation make some women more vulnerable to human rights violations than others.
Autobiographical narratives enrich this perspective; through their illustrative power they have portrayed an extreme precariousness of the life of people who, both because of the conflict or the militarized economy, struggle every day to make a living. Autobiographies have also showed that women’s insecurities are multidirectional, they are coming not only or principally from the government, as mostly advanced by women’s organizations’ reports, but also from their own ethnic groups, including ethnic armed groups, communities and family units. In this regard these narratives confirm the concept of “war as continuum” as elucidated by Cynthia Cockburn and other feminist scholars who believe that violence not just starts with conflict and terminates with the end of it. For women, conflict manifests itself also in the domestic spheres where they are subjected to various forms of gender-based violence.
Consequently when women have expressed what peace means for them they have come up with statements similar to this of May Sabe Phyu, one of the leading female peace activists:
“The peace that I seek is not only about the end of civil wars, but also the end of violence against women. Without this, we can’t say it’s true peace” May Sabe Phyu, Director of Gender Equality Network (Irrawaddy, 2014)
Besides this when women have theorized the strategies to achieve peace they have identified multiple solutions such as the creation of a federal state that could guarantee the self-determination of ethnic groups and transitional justice mechanisms, themes that emerge in women’s organizations reports. In autobiographies where women have expressed their dreams and unfulfilled needs as basis of a peaceful life: being reunited with their families, going back to their native places and being able to pursue education.
The key for peace identified in women’s various narratives is women’s political participation: this should allow women from civil society organizations to formally sit in peace table not just as observers. Women claim their right to be part of this process not just they are victims of the conflict or because they represent half of the population. They want to be able to contribute because they have the skills to help the country towards national reconciliation. Women have been active through various activities of conflict prevention. They have trying to persuade armies not to fight in residential areas, to not attack property and people and they have promoted dialogue between Muslim and Buddhist communities in order to prevent clashes. They have also worked through projects with affected communities providing humanitarian assistance and health services, they have given psychosocial support to the survivors of sexual violence. They are able to represent different interests because of this community work. Women’s organizations have also conducted leadership training for hundreds of women for about 20 years. However, they have are still dismissed both by the government and the members of their own ethnic groups. As Cheery Zahau, from the Women’s League of Chinland, has commented “We are trying to convince the men, but the men keep saying ‘oh we don’t have skillful women’. It’s just not true… We are here, we are ready, and we have the skills; we just need the opportunities” (Wolff, 2012).
Studies carried out for different conflict contexts in different countries have demonstrated that women’s substantial participation in peace negotiations has increased the chances for peace agreements to be signed, to be implemented and to last and therefore be more sustainable (Sandole & Staroste, 2015). As shown by women’s autobiographies women have repeatedly showed their commitment to work for the service of their community. Kham Lay (2010: 7) narrating her work with war-affected communities has stated: “We must walk on, through the jungle, the mine fields, the storms and the hunger. We must continue to reach our goals of peace and democracy in our country”. This perspective is in contrast with the ‘male-streamed’ interests of different actors who have merely concentrated in the military operations to take control of economically strategic areas and the cessation of hostilities in order to undertake economic businesses.
The ‘male-streamed’ institutions of Myanmar might not be persuaded by my arguments. However, the international community could exercise pressure on the country as demonstrated in the past through campaigns for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and towards more democratic institutions. The European Union is one of the major donors of the current peacebuilding process. This institution has never tried to shake the current framework of the negotiations that see as exclusive negotiating partners the government and ethnic armed groups with a complete exclusion of the civil society, pattern that is also undertaken by Aung San Suu Kyi who is now leading the whole pacification process. Notwithstanding EU formal commitments towards women’s inclusion in peace negotiations, it has never placed any conditionality for example on quota for implementing the actions it funds.
In
conclusion, in this paper I have argued that the ‘marginal voices’ of Myanmar women bring a more
holistic and comprehensive vision to security in comparison to the dominant and
univocal purported by the Myanmar government. The ‘marginal voices’ of ethnic
and politically active women aim to disrupt the state-centered narrative with
their multiple perspectives. They are telling us about the detrimental impacts
of the security management on the population consequently creating more
insecurity. The ‘marginal voices’ are telling us that to achieve peace a
cessation of hostilities is not enough; what it is needed is an elimination of
all kinds of violence present at all levels of the society, including both
direct and structural violence. From there it would be possible to build a more
equitable and peaceful society based on the elimination of gender-based and
ethnic discrimination where everyone could fulfill their own potential. Women
have expressed through their actions and different narrative forms their
commitment, capability and agency; if women’s voices are ‘decolonized’, they
could enrich and significantly inform the current debate on pacification and
lead to more successful actions in comparison to the ones pursued so far.
[1] The official name of the country is ‘Republic of the Union of Myanmar’ even if it also commonly referred with the colonial name ‘Burma’, the denomination held up to 1989.
[2] This term is borrowed from Suzanne Clisby’s article Gender mainstreaming or just more male-streaming? (2005). Even though she is utilizing this word for different purposes and to explain a different context (the case of the Law of Popular Participation in Bolivia), I am retaining this phrase to signify how men’s interests are often privileged in the implementation of policies contravening gender mainstreaming principles.
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