Summary
Contents
Subject index
- What impact does gender difference make to political decision-making? - Will the political empowerment of women contribute to a more peaceful world? The role of gender has been increasingly recognized as central to the study and analysis of the traditionally male domains of war and international relations. This book explores the key role of gender in peace research, conflict resolution and international politics. Rather than simply 'add gender' the aim is to transcend different disciplinary boundaries and conceptual approaches to provide a more integrated basis for future study. To this end it uniquely combines theoretical chapters alongside empirical case studies to demonstrate the i
The Problem of Essentialism
The Problem of Essentialism
The Appeal of Essentialism
How are people persuaded to support a political position, a movement, a programme, a candidate? Among a variety of possible political and communicative strategies, one that has proven effective is to appeal to a common identity. To take two examples from very different places in the political spectrum, consider first a remark by US Senator Robert Dole, part of his closing statement in his first debate with President Bill Clinton during the 1996 US presidential election campaign. Summing up himself and his candidacy, he said, ‘I know who I am and I know where I'm from’.1 Standing opposite the US President often denigrated as ‘Slick Willy’, this was a shrewd appeal to conservative, homespun, white American values. Dole's reference to his identity and origins was intended to offer the viewers reassurance that, if he knew himself, they could trust him and know what and how he thought. From a more radical point on the political spectrum, consider this evocation by the Australian anti-nuclear campaigner Helen Caldicott (War Resisters' League, 1981): ‘I appeal especially to the women … because we understand the genesis of life.’ The reason she adduced for this special understanding was that ‘Our bodies are built to nurture life.’ Perhaps most telling about this appeal is not that Helen Caldicott made it, but that a major pacifist movement was so struck by it as to immortalize it in their calendar.
The strategy underlying statements of this kind is to mobilize people on the basis of who they are, and the views and preferences they are assumed to hold because of who they are. It is an appeal that aims to circumvent the intellect and touch not simply the audience's emotions but their very identity, their sense of who they are. The appeal is to the essence of the target audience, based on a clear sense of what that essence is. The name for the strategy, and for the philosophy of politics and the perspective on people that lie behind it, is essentialism. It has proven capable of mobilizing large numbers of people in movements and campaigns for a wide variety of objectives – among them peace and disarmament, justice for oppressed groups, and civil and political rights. Nonetheless, this chapter will argue that, for political movements and campaigns seeking these goals, essentialism is ultimately unhelpful and destructive.
The Unavoidable Encounter
An encounter with essentialism is unavoidable in any discussion of the impact of gender difference in political decisionmaking and in conflict resolution. The reason is that discussing gender in politics means thinking about a fundamental component of our individual and social identities. The way that most of us, most of the time, approach such discussions is shaped strongly by essentialist ways of thinking. They are a common means of cognition, of organizing and rationalizing our experience of our social worlds. They are not the result of scholarly research; rather, they both form and draw on what people often call ‘common sense’. We tend to group people by, for example, their race, nation, ethnicity, religious belief, gender, sexual preference or social class. And then we often generalize about the views and behaviour of the people in each group. We may see one group as essentially untrustworthy and mean, while another is thought to be hardworking and noble. One group may be characterized as bad drivers and poor financial managers, while another is regarded as mechanically adept and well suited for managerial positions. One group may be deemed better at concrete thought, another at abstraction. One group may be regarded as inherently competitive and prone to conflict, while another is inherently peaceful. Such sweeping generalizations are an ordinary part of the way in which we commonly organize our knowledge and understanding of our social environment. They are also the stuff of essentialism.
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