Crossing Boundaries During Peace and Conflict

Dealing with change and conflicting identities has become a central element in our increasingly complex, globalized world. Many books have been written about ethnic groups in conflict, addressing questions of motivations for becoming violent or setting out to find the right recipe for peaceful cohabitation of people from different ethnic or national groups. However, we still lack in understanding how processes of social change, such as ethno-national conflict and conflict settlement processes interact with identity change and in what way shifts in different identity categories, such as ethnicity, nationality, race, gender, class, and the like are interconnected. In particular, listening to women who have experienced ethno-national conflict and its aftermath raises many questions about our understanding of what happens with individuals in situations of social change.

Why is it important to look at the interconnection of identity categories in processes of social change? And how do the making and change of gender, ethnic, and other identity categories intersect during periods of conflict and conflict settlement? Setting the conceptual framework, this chapter addresses existing gaps in the study of ethno-national conflict and conflict settlement. It does so by highlighting the need to explore the making and change of intersecting identity categories during these processes. Women’s experiences are largely written out of official narratives of ethno-national conflicts to protect the “manliness” of armed conflict based on a hegemonic (heterosexual) masculinity (Cohn, 2013, p. 23). Feminist research has highlighted that this exclusion prevents conflict societies from being transformed into peaceful ones (Cohn, 2013; Enloe, 2002; Kronsell & Svedberg, 2012).

In my inductive, comparative study, I address the following set of questions: Peter A. Hall and Michele Lamont (2013) have reminded us recently of the old adage that the most innovative insights are dis-covered at the boundaries of disciplines. By incorporating richer conceptions of social relations into analyses of comparative conflict and peace processes through more intensive dialogue with sociology, my research follows the pathways of political scientists studying social movements or ethnic politics (Horowitz, 1985; McAdam, Tilly, & Tarrow, 2001; Todd, 2010) who work on these boundaries.

What can we learn about identity processes in ethno-national mobilizations by listening to women’s voices? How are social and symbolic boundaries bridged during conflict? And in what way do different identity processes intersect?

Why is a multilayered approach to conflict settlement essential for the development of a sustainable peace? What do we miss if we only focus on the official peace processes at the macro level of political decision making? Where do identity changes manifest, and what meaning does this have for peace processes?

This chapter builds on description, analysis, and interpretation of female activist’s collective identity stories in Chapters 3 and 4. It aims to contribute new perspectives on intersectional boundary processes in peace and conflict situations by asking “what can we learn from women’s experiences in Chiapas and Northern Ireland?” Reflecting on lessons learned from this comparative study of identity processes during peace and conflict, I set out in this chapter to highlight some general trends and tendencies evolving from my findings. However, I would at the same time remind the reader of the differences in perceptions and positioning within each category.

In Chiapas and in Northern Ireland, women were actors in the ideological re-creation of the community and in the transformation of its culture. Shifts in women’s ethnic and gender perceptions during conflict are interlinked with changes in the positioning of women toward the state, the community, and the family. However, in order to be widely accepted these shifts at the intersubjective level of identification need to be translated into objectified, social changes in demobilization processes. The opening of autonomous spaces for women to bridge boundaries and form alliances on shared interests has brought about transformations in both ethnic and gender identity, in Chiapas more than in Northern Ireland. This is evident in the visibility of shifts in women’s image from being “silent symbols of resistance” to being “vocal agents of change” and in the translation of these shifts in perception into changes in gendered power structures. Ethnonational mobilizations against unequal power structures provide a space for the formation of shared gender interests amongst women within a certain ethnic category.