Peace and Mothering

The fact that mothering has been associated with compassion and affection and particularly been attributed to women has made it a topic of debate on whether mothering is innately interwoven with peacekeeping. The theoretical debates related to mothering have evolved within three stages: essentialism, structuralism, and poststructuralism. The essentialist view regards mothering as an innate, natural, and universal act. The structuralist approach, on the other hand, takes mothering as socially constructed and questions the “innate” characteristics attributed to women as mothers. The poststructuralist viewpoint challenges the former strand of thinking by indicating that mothering is not constructed, but rather something that is performed and must be learned and rehearsed. The practices of motherhood (caring and nurturing for others) as applied in the political realms would ...