Chapter 12
Unprecedented advances in global interconnectivity have accelerated the pace of globalisation. In a few short decades, globalisation has come to characterise changes across wide ranging disciplines. Consider increased consolidation of economic markets and global business interests, heightened awareness of climate crises and the planet’s finite carrying capacity, instantaneous interaction across the internet, and expanded consciousness of worldwide human rights abuses and extreme discrepancies in resource distribution.
In 2001, Mark Juergensmeyer, author of Terror in the mind of God: the global rise of religious violence, added another unexpected dimension to globalisation with his investigation of major world religions. In his book, he describes this phenomenon from an insider’s perspective, analysing the rhetoric of male religious fanatics who have captured public attention and mobilised men by the thousands (Juergensmeyer 2001). These leaders and their followers brazenly assert a willingness to sacrifice people in the service of God, the angry and vengeful father. However, what do wives, sisters, mothers and daughters of these religious warriors do when they awaken each morning, and how might their actions reveal very different dreams and aspirations?
Women’s alternative acts comprise data for my research, derived from stories of 1000 women collectively nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 in a landmark Swiss initiative to draw attention to a very different and remarkable kind of globalisation: the globalisation of compassion. The results of my research strongly indicate that 318the warriors’ impulse to usher in the ultimate rule of a particular God through violence and force has a strong gender correlate. According to a rhetorical analysis of peace and reconciliation narratives – as recorded in 1000 peacewomen across the globe (Association 2005), the collected stories of the 1000 Nobel nominees of every religious persuasion and background – women are engaged in activities quite different from their male counterparts. This idea is corroborated by eminent peace researcher Elise Boulding, who writes in The cultures of peace: the hidden side of history, that ‘The holy war culture is a male warrior culture headed by a patriarchal warrior-god. It demands the subjection of women and other aliens to men, the proto-patriarchs, and to God (or the gods)’ (Boulding 2000, p17). An understanding of women’s global performance represents an altogether new prospect for humanity; in particular, the globalisation of compassion, which has emerged as the critical focus of my research.
The result of rhetorical analysis of peace and conflict narratives in combination with systematic analysis of how different rhetorical acts are portrayed (or not portrayed) in world media reinforces a growing sense that humanity is deeply imperilled by continued refusal to distinguish the actions of women as global citizens, as peace activists, and as spiritual visionaries, from those of men. Although it may appear that the fundamental drama of holy war between good and evil is embedded in all human beings, the obsession with supremacy is – my research suggests – predominantly male. I argue that these furies are especially unique to a hegemonic understanding of religious history, revealing a profound ignorance of multifaceted feminist expressions of spirituality. Furthermore, it is my thesis that significant progress in the world in establishing reconciliation and positive peace (Galtung 1996) across cultures depends on deepening our collective understanding of these underlying feminist principles, strengthening our ability to interpret them and, above all, incorporating them into daily public discourse, notably through the media.
Most recently, author and social critic Jeremy Rifkin embraced this view in The empathic civilisations: the race to global consciousness in a world in crisis (2009). Rifkin notes:319
What is required now is nothing less than a leap to global empathic consciousness and in less than a generation if we are to resurrect the global economy and revitalise the biosphere. The question becomes this: what is the mechanism that allows empathic sensitivity to mature and consciousness to expand through history. (Rifkin 2010)
Leading peace researchers Galtung and Lynch (2010) offer peace journalism as a promising tool for expediting this foundational shift, and the findings of my own research provide compelling evidence for this conviction. Like many of my colleagues, I originally undertook research to better understand ways to reshape a world that is currently being mediated almost exclusively through the lens of war and conflict narratives. By contrast, the women I feature in my research speak eloquently through very different kinds of actions, and the principles underlying their actions embody many of the conceptual currents running throughout peace journalism. I contend that a powerful strategy to globalise compassion – to move empathic sensitivity from a theoretical ideal to a practical reality – is to regularly highlight these acts, performed daily across every continent, as featured news.
At the conclusion of my research, I put forward a set of hypothetical categories for reframing news stories, with the intention of infusing compassionate behaviour into mainstream public discourse. Ultimately, shifting perceptions of the newsworthy from ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ to ‘if it heals, it reveals’ requires a reformulation of the performances that are highlighted on a day-to-day basis: performances modelled by women activists across the globe. I think of each category as a strand of discussion that can be consciously incorporated in the media to weave a tapestry of peace. As it turns out, this formulation is a vivid and useful extension of the peace journalism model, especially the following doctrines: to give voice to the views of all rival parties at every level; to offer creative ideas for conflict resolution, development, peacemaking and peacekeeping; and to pay attention to peace stories and postwar developments (Lynch & McGoldrick 2005). Bringing women’s peacebuilding creativity into the foreground of public awareness, by means of the public media, constitutes a momentous step forward in the advancement of global justice and lasting peace.320
Unarguably the organised and systematic perpetuation of warfare is, and has been throughout history, largely the domain of men, even though it is common to hear war characterised as a byproduct of ‘human nature’. Typically women, the exclusive child bearers and most frequent life-sutainers of young children across drastically different cutures, conduct the affairs of homemaking and care giving, to whatever extent possible, out of the direct line of fire. However, throughout the late 20th and now the early 21st centuries, technological advances have extended the reach of deadly violence far outside artificially constructed battle lines, cosquently endangering the security of all sentient life (Heyzer 2004). One could plausibly argue that ubiquitous weapons of mass destruction have in and of themselves globalised warfare, taking it far beyond the limited notion of exclusive engagement between combatants. In such a lethal environment, collateral damage, or more accurately injury and death of civilians (largely women and children), is unavoidable.
However, more and more women in the world, inordinately impacted by toxic violence perpetrated by militaries, militias and/or terrorists across every continent, are consolidating distinct and potent activities as antidotes and finding creative strategies to stretch a net of compassion over the most vulnerable and powerless in every society. This movement can be understood as the globalisation of compassion. This paradigm of globalisation is characterised by what Johan Galtung refers to as positive peace (as contrasted to negative peace, which is defined simply as the cessation or absence of active violence regardless of how tentative the ceasefire). In a positive peace model however, solutions represent the introduction of harmony, analogous to the positive health model, which is characterised by wellness rather than simply the absence of symptoms. In Galtung’s global analysis, notions of direct personal violence (such as inter-gender or gang-related), inter-state violence, and all forms of indirect violence including structural, cultural and nature-related violence are inseparable. To establish true positive peace, harmony must be reasserted and sustained across multiple dimensions. My research underscores the multitude and diversity of models for positive peace currently operating on the ground, represented by the 321collection of the 1000 peacewomen’s narratives. In each model, one or more women stand at the centre of innovation, and in so far as the models achieve harmonious results and inspire replication, compassion (and positive peace) are indeed becoming globalised.
Looking back several decades, feminist theorists Nancy Hartsock and Irene Diamond foreshadowed the vital need for this form of global consciousness, predating Rifkin by three decades. As early as 1981, they offered a cautionary note to pay ‘close attention to women’s activity rather than men’s and the consequent thoroughgoing focus on whole human beings’, which ‘necessitates the development of more encompassing categories of analysis of political life’ (Diamond & Hartsock 1981, p719).
With the goal in mind of creating a systematic set of globally relevant positive peace categories, I constructed a research study to explore women’s intentional peacebuilding activities. Results of the study confirmed my hypothesis that the vast majority of women’s rhetorical acts remain imperceptible to the general media, in stark contrast to repetitious and dominant narratives of divisiveness, often erupting in bloodshed and currently labelled as headlines or as featured news stories. The conclusion that public discourse is saturated by the rhetorical acts of men comes as no great surprise. However, by shifting focus away from dominant foreground noise, and then systematically analysing the nature and impact of global peacebuilding activity (too often lost in the background), this investigation seeks to shed light on a more balanced and salient understanding of human performance on the world stage and provide hope for more durable cultures of peace in the future.
It is prudent to keep in mind that according to the Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC), four out of five of the world’s nearly 45 million people who were forced to seek safety in a country not their own or who were internally displaced within their own borders are women, children and young people. Women and adolescent girls are especially vulnerable to exploitation, rape and abuse (WRC 2010). This estimate of women and children comprising nearly 80 percent of total refugee and internally 322displaced populations worldwide is consistent with ongoing research by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR 2009). The plight of these individuals has reached epic proportions, begging a wide range of questions including: What resources do these women and children require; how are these most effectively provided; who provides them; and how can such vast numbers of people be reintegrated into either the former or renewed cultures from which they fled?
In 2003, these and other critical questions became a motivating catalyst for Swiss parliamentarian and Council of Europe member Ruth Gaby Vermot-Mangold. In her capacity with the European Union, Vermot-Mangold visited refugee camps and war-torn regions across Europe: in Azerbaijan and Armenia; in Bosnia and Kosovo; and in Serbia, Georgia, and Chechnya. During these journeys, she became acutely aware of wreckage left in the wake of war. Yet everywhere she travelled, she met and visited with hundreds of women who laboured tirelessly under dire circumstances: struggling to restore stability and security to the lives of families, friends, and communities; to sustain nonviolence; to reconcile with former enemies; and to build viable alternatives to overcome intractable conflict. These creative and courageous efforts to rehabilitate the shattered lives of survivors and to implement strategies for moving forward went virtually unnoticed; these projects and programs left scarcely a trace in the world outside their narrow sphere of influence and action.
Dismayed by this state of affairs in which women were being so completely obscured within the background of public discourse, Vermot-Mangold (2005) determined to reduce global ignorance. She assembled an international team of 20 women, who in turn helped organise nine evaluation panels based on geographic regions. Together, they set an ambitious agenda to identify, publicise and network the deeds and stories of 1000 women labouring in and for peace. The association drafted criteria for nomination and sent out the first candidate call over the internet in 2003, satisfied with the presumption that nominators could and would capably define women’s peace work on an inductive basis. As nominations began to flow in, they discovered that the scope of women’s peace work runs the gamut of what we now recognise and 323define under the rubric of peacebuilding, inclusive of all the necessary and simultaneous activities vividly described by Elizabeth Ferris, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution – and co-director of the Brookings–Bern Project on Internal Displacement, in her keynote address to the 2009 International Conference on Peace and Reconciliation. Ferris stated:
Former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali originally presented peacebuilding as ‘action to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid relapse into conflict’. Since then, the concept of peacebuilding has expanded to include addressing the root causes of conflict, early warning and response efforts, violence prevention, advocacy, civilian and military peacekeeping, military intervention, humanitarian assistance, ceasefire agreements, and the establishment of peace zones. (Ferris 2009)
In less than two years, more than 2000 women performing work across many of these dimensions and others were submitted for nomination. Every nominee had to be submitted by at least two individuals and their references carefully vetted by association members and evaluation panels. Interestingly, a key criterion for nomination was that each candidate’s work had to exemplify the work of many. In other words, the association believed that if the same call went out on any given day, there would be a high likelihood for a completely different set of women engaged in peace innovations across the world to be nominated and selected.
The prevalence of peacebuilding efforts at the grassroots was recently highlighted in a July 2010 interview between Krista Tippett, host of National Public Radio’s (NPR) Speaking of faith, and John Paul Lederach, a veteran of crisis mediation for over three decades in over 25 countries and five continents. In the interview, Lederach recounts stories about grassroots peace initiatives in specific localities on very different continents. He notes:
Because I work at both a grassroots level and a very high political level; in some ways, to be very honest, the sophistication by which 324they’re doing it at a local level is leap years ahead of how politics is typically done, which is an all-or-nothing kind of format in which every decision is gauged primarily on whether if we haven’t won, we have at least assured the other cannot carry victory away. (2010)
Throughout the interview, Lederach shares his direct experiences with women and men, from local communities and without benefit of news coverage or fanfare, who are recrafting their understanding of the ‘other’. This is accomplished by forging highly improbable relationships with others, who have typically been their enemies over years of conflict and violence.
In a similar fashion, the narratives of 1000 peacewomen (and scores of other women who remain unrecorded and undocumented) echo this theme. These women consistently employ compassion, creativity and cross-cultural sensitivity in order to transform conflicts in profound ways that government officials and government-appointed negotiators, while enjoying the spotlight of constant media attention, have failed to realise, despite years of effort.
Moved by this monumental undertaking and curious to assess the impact of the 1000 peacewomen stories on public discourse, I undertook a qualitative document analysis (QDA) in accordance with the emerging method described by David Altheide et al. (2008). In so doing, I made use of two comparable sets of data. The first dataset consisted of nine peacewomen narratives, identified by a systematic sampling process to ensure diversity. From 1000 peacewomen across the globe (Association 2005), the text compilation of the stories of all 1000 women included in the project, I selected one narrative at random from each of the nine geographic regions represented. The 1000 narratives in this volume constituted an unprecedented source for content analysis and provided both the inspiration and the starting point for the research. Each entry in the book was a record of the nominee’s initiative, as drafted by a native-speaking journalist who typically conducted a face-to-face or telephone interview. I analysed each narrative with 325an eye to clarifying and bringing forward the ‘core rhetorical act’ (the term I used for the characteristic performance of each peacewoman) represented by the woman’s specific labour in her particular context on behalf of building peace.
Following this random selection, I paired each of the sampled stories with a headline news story, also collected systematically through a LexisNexis search of wire service news stories feeding popular media outlets. The specific news or foreground story was selected from all those occurring in the peacewoman’s country of origin on the day of (or the day after) press conferences held in 50 worldwide locations, announcing the nomination of 1000 women from 153 countries as collective recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize for 2005. The resulting pairs (a background 1000 peacewomen across the globe narrative coupled with a foreground news story) were called local focus dyads (LFDs) and created the basis for the QDA.
Using all the LFDs, I structured a meta-analysis to address several overarching and puzzling questions. By contrasting core rhetorical acts featured in media from the same region as the nine women (and occurring on the same day the nomination was made public), my goal was to gain insights into the following:
• What characterises rhetorical acts of empowered women?
• What characterises rhetorical acts featured by news media?
• By juxtaposing these two types of rhetoric, how is the discourse on peace and war distorted and how are activities of women rendered invisible?
• What new possibilities for peace emerge when we rack focus1 and reverse background and foreground representations?
The investigation sought to draw attention to lessons learned from a synthesis of peacewomen enterprises, viewed through the lens of
326subject matter that is amplified on the world stage versus subject matter that is omitted. One day I hope similar scrutiny will be given to the 991 other stories in the 1000 peacewomen across the globe compilation in a search for even greater insight.
Table 1 provides a composite of the rhetorical acts of the nine selected peacewomen, individually referred to as the ‘rhetor’. To identify the defining rhetorical act represented in each story, as well as in each news article paired with it, I developed and followed a rigorous process of iterative coding, adapted from Strauss and Corbin’s methodology of grounded theory (1990, 1994), moving from each woman’s specific work within her local context to a broader statement summarising the core rhetorical act represented by that work. Then, I repeated the systematic coding process for the companion news stories in each LFD.
Table 1 Peacewomen’s core rhetorical acts
| Background’ rhetor | Core rhetorical act | |
|---|---|---|
| Durga Devi | RHETOR aspires to social productivity through women’s empowerment projects | |
| Region – South Asia | ||
| Country – India | ||
| Amelia Rokotuivana | RHETOR unites constituents for public benefit: an end to French nuclear testing and colonisation | |
| Region – Oceania | ||
| Country – Fiji | ||
| Nina Kolybashkina | RHETOR demonstrates peacebuilding and reconciliation strategies using skills as an interpreter | |
| Region – Europe | ||
| Country – Ukraine | ||
| Alma Montenegro de Fletcher | RHETOR seeks justice for all through available but limited legal channels | |
| Region – Latin America and Caribbean | ||
| Country – Panama | ||
| Landon Pearson | RHETOR demonstrates lifelong dedication to advocating for human rights on behalf of children | |
| Region – North America | ||
| Country – Canada | ||
| Zanaa Jurmed | RHETOR employs multiple strategies to achieve democratic civil society in Mongolia. Multidimensional nature of her work, most recently ‘re-focused’ on the ‘social sphere’ to more directly develop human capacity | |
| Region – Eastern Asia | ||
| Country – Mongolia | ||
| Genoveva Ximenes Alves | RHETOR transforms local school into school for peace and serves in multiple leadership capacities in program she helped create | |
| Region – Southeast Asia | ||
| Country – East Timor | ||
| Jeanne M Gacoreke | RHETOR gives direct assistance to women and children traumatised by sexual abuse and related war crimes, works to raise awareness to break through taboo of silence concerning atrocities. | |
| Region – Africa | ||
| Country – Burundi | ||
| Palwasha Hassan | RHETOR directs resources to empower destitute Afghan women and protect their human rights | |
| Region – Asia and Middle East | ||
| Country – Afghanistan | ||
327Finally, the axial codes for the study (open codes grouped categorically) were rooted in Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s ‘Elements of descriptive analysis for rhetorical acts’ (1982). According to Campbell, truth does not exist independently of people’s social interaction. She notes:
Whereas the [empirical] scientist would say, ‘the most important thing is the discovery and testing of truth’, the rhetorician (one who studies rhetoric and takes a rhetorical perspective) would say, ‘truth cannot walk on its own legs. It must be carried by people to other people. It must be made effective through language, through argument and appeal’. (Campbell 1982, p3)
Thus I predicated the findings of the study on the assumption that news reporting is a fundamental means for carrying truth to the general public and functions as a significant mechanism to frame public perception. The overriding question is, if this vehicle delivered alternate 328news, might there be other more salient perceptions dominating public discourse?
The QDA confirmed one mechanism for globalising cultures of war like those characterised by Mark Juergensmeyer and others: that is, the media’s persistent foregrounding of stories of conflict featuring hierarchical rank, with a preference for official sources, and ubiquitous neglect of global peacebuilding achievements and collaborative problem-solving. The media’s failure to boldly feature peace-related accomplishments – models of reconciliation, cooperation, rehabilitation and compassion that might be repeated and adapted to other contexts – depletes the human knowledge base, thwarting our capacity to reverse cultures of violence and replace them with durable and peaceable cultures. Even more damaging is the realisation that as long as we persist in the belief that essential human nature is violent and self-serving, the more we continue to report stories about ourselves to reinforce these beliefs, and the more social constructs become extensions of these beliefs about ourselves.
Several of the stories drawn from the compilation 1000 peacewomen across the globe, viewed in the context of LFDs, highlight the collective ignorance created to a large extent by the ever narrowing thematic repertoire of the popular media. Conversely, the study suggests a set of alternate thematic threads (detailed in sections to follow), crafted from the fabric of these women’s stories, and woven together into a novel narrative tapestry. The process of racking focus, from war journalism to peace journalism, shifting the stories of women’s compassionate peacebuilding activities from a dimly lit background into a brightly illuminated foreground, is the process referred to in this study as the globalisation of compassion.
For example, in one LFD, the story of Mongolian ‘professor, turned political activist’, Zanaa Jurmed (Association 2005, p951), is paired with a foreground news story dealing with the infusion of large amounts of cash into the Mongolian private sector by the World Bank. The foundational premise of this viewpoint is that growing the private sector 329is essential to economic capacity-building throughout the country. Unfortunately, the recent global recession has demonstrated how fast this logic can unravel, and, in the wake of that unravelling, revealed the frightening scarcity of social safety nets.
Zanaa Jurmed’s story demonstrates an alternate line of reasoning. After years directly involved in the political process of building a modern democratic civil society in Mongolia, Jurmed perceived a critical need to refocus energy more directly on the social sphere. In this arena, she initiated and founded a number of women and human rights NGOs nationwide, including the National Watch Network Center of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) (Association 2005, p951). From this perspective, development and protection of human capital take precedence over development and protection of money and the interests of those who control and manipulate monetary resources. Such rhetorical acts, referencing social concern for those nearer to the middle or bottom of the socioeconomic continuum, along with compassion and care for vulnerable populations, rarely dominate the headlines. In the terms outlined in the peace journalism model, her story is ‘people-oriented’ whereas the World Bank story is ‘elite-oriented’.
In addition to Jurmed’s work, multiple initiatives in this study illustrate the same point, including: women’s empowerment projects among the destitute in India and in Afghanistan, peacebuilding and reconciliation strategies in the Ukraine; Canadian human rights initiatives for global children, justice for all in Panama, peace education programs in East Timor, and assistance to sexually abused victims of war in Burundi. Each program is important for the social benefit it brings to people. Nevertheless, as repeatedly illustrated in each LFD, economic stories featuring people-to-material transactions overshadow these socially significant narratives where people-to-people transactions prevail. When the victims of conflict and violence appear in the news, they are usually, according to Galtung and Lynch, ‘able-bodied white males’ from ‘our’ side; whereas peace journalism is ‘a journalism of attachment to all actual and potential victims’ (in Galtung & Lynch 2010, p17). 330
News services consistently fixate on the values underpinning a competitive free market economy to the exclusion of other values. War journalism is ‘propaganda-oriented’. Propaganda here refers to attempts to ‘shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions and direct behaviour’ (Jowett & O’Donnell 1999, p6). And in this regard the news media are complicit in undermining a public consciousness of ideals that millions of women have exemplified for millennium: compassion, generosity, and service to others. Jurmed, like hundreds of thousands of women who function with limited resources under extreme conditions, managed to help heal and transform lives through dedication to direct service rather than through the generation of greater wealth at the top of the social spectrum. Practically speaking, from the perspective of the women who initiate, advocate for, and work in these social programs, progress is measured by the benefits achieved from the bottom up rather than, in terms of economic prospects, from the top down. Rhetorical acts of this nature appear to have intrinsic value regardless of whether money changes hands. In these cases, progress becomes the embodiment of people-to-people interventions celebrating the worth and dignity of many, not simply people-to-capital interventions measured in economic terms with the highest rewards for the most successful elites.
Some economists argue that social programs have value only to the extent that they rehabilitate people to engage productively in the market. Proponents of this perspective discuss services offered (for example, in the context of peace education, women’s empowerment, and trauma recovery programs), strictly in terms of their success or failure at restoring recipients’ willingness to re-engage in the pursuit of affluence. What is sorely missing from this point of view is the notion of ‘sufficiency’ that is embedded in women’s rhetorical acts throughout this study. In a world where a chief executive officer of a major corporation earns more than enough to feed an entire population in some countries for a year, the peacewomen in my study repeatedly engage in acts that demonstrate real world strategies to rebalance such a distorted notion of progress. If the rhetoric of female-based compassion were to be on par with (or even supersede) the rhetoric of male-based 331economic expansion, we might be able to better view ourselves as a global human family and act as though each human being, and all of our resources, mattered.
The peacewomen I investigated provide role models in terms of their practical implementation of compassionate acts and efforts. These locally enacted but globally instructive projects represent a ‘webocracy’ – a web of achievable, sustainable, and secure livelihoods for countless people across every continent.
The work of Nina Kolybahskina of the Ukraine exemplifies another seminal shift, in this case around the idea of how human security is characterised by the media. Her core rhetorical act is bridging diversity: initiating acts of coming together for the collective good of all. This activity distinguished many of the rhetorical acts of her colleagues, yet collectively such stories rarely find their way into public discourse. Instead, the media repeatedly associates human security with force, presumably under the assumption that sufficient force correlates with order. In this limited paradigm, imposing order is portrayed as far and away more critical to citizen security than all other strategies for deep healing, causes to which so many peacewomen are dedicated. I argue that order and healing must go together. The media, however, overwhelmingly opts to feature force and coercion over the use of other tactics.
As a young woman, Nina Kolybahskina trained as an interpreter; as she matured, she discovered that her role as an interpreter gave her special insight into the rhetoric of multiple sides in conflict situations. Through the act of translation, she became more and more adept at gleaning the common needs underlying points of conflict. Her narrative notes:
That job taught her that translation requires not merely shifting between languages, but also finding common points between the systems of thinking of diverse groups. Later, in managing social projects, she realised that providing basic social services was essentially a work of translating the needs of community members into the language of project proposals and policy recommendations. (Association 2005, p101)
332The rhetorical act of interpreting takes on much broader significance in this narrative. Beyond casting the words of one language into another language, Kolybahskina learned to use words as pathways into the heart of issues and as clues to how people frame and express their own needs. As she grew more skilled in this regard, her work evolved: she was no longer strictly engaged in resolving disputes, where some points are won and others lost, but rather in finding ways to meet the needs of whole populations, regardless of the side of a conflict they represented. Her role became bonding people around their collective destinies rather than dividing them according to their competing interests. However, few global citizens know of Nina Kolybahskina’s work with the Network of Intercultural Exchange and Inter-Ethnic Tolerance in the Ukraine. Practically all forms of media remain silent with regard to rhetorical acts of this nature. Rather, media place continual and repetitious emphasis on clashes of oppositional interests. In a world saturated with stories of self-interested forces fighting for supremacy over the other to secure their own exclusive wellbeing, peaceful conflict resolution is rendered an aberration and largely unachievable.
These two stories are representative of the findings of my study, which concludes with an analysis of three overarching thematic currents: human security, progress, and sustained agency. When the background acts of peacewomen and the foreground acts of news stories are clustered in these categories and then considered side by side, distinctly different patterns of meaning for each category emerge. It is important to note, in the context of this research, that the thematic labels are useful devices to illustrate divergent inductive descriptions. However, they should in no way be confused with definitions previously established by international bodies (for example, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR] or the United Nations Development Programme [UNDP]). For example, in 1994, the UNDP comprehensively scrutinised human security from many angles. The term ‘human security’, as applied in the context of the United Nations, implies a set of very specific meanings (UNDP 1994). In the context of this research, 333the term is used as a label for two opposite perspectives – one featured regularly in the news media and the other altogether absent from the news media.
The following tables provide a summary of the thematic framework and display the conceptual conclusions that I drew on each side of the Dyads for all three categories. The left side shows meanings and considerations that emerged from an analysis of background narratives, while the right side shows meanings and considerations that emerged from an analysis of foreground news stories. Depending on whether one takes a background or foreground perspective, the understanding of each theme differs dramatically.
Based on analysis of the core rhetorical acts in the peacewomen’s narratives, progress is considered in terms of social and relational achievements. From the point of view of news, progress relies exclusively on expansion of material wealth. There are three differentiating factors along the dimension of progress.
| Progress | ||
|---|---|---|
| Peacewomen – background narratives | News stories – foreground narratives | |
| Progress considered in light of social, relational achievements. | Progress relies exclusively on expansion of material wealth. | |
| • Acts of social compassion, concern and care for vulnerable populations (internally displaced persons, refugees, etc) | • Acts of economic expansion and material wealth | |
| Progress is defined in terms of measures instituted for the public good/social welfare, not simply economic advancement (eg education, trauma recovery, women’s empowerment programs). | Progress measured exclusively in economic terms. All human development reduced to economic terms versus awareness and cultivation of alternate values. | |
| • People-to-people transactions | • People-to-material transactions | |
| Social initiatives ‘count’ as progress, worthy of positive regard and public interest. | As evidenced by repetition of the Dow Jones and other stock market metrics. | |
| • Bottom-up strategies accounting for sufficiency | • Top-down strategies accounting for supremacy | |
| Wellbeing for many/most whenever possible, rather than for designated few. | Emphasis on individuals or corporations acting as individuals relied upon to provide the means for others to advance.334 | |
Based on an analysis of peacewomen’s narratives, human security and wellbeing are achieved through acts of unity and collectivity, whereas, in the media, human security is depicted as being achieved through powerplays between ‘champions’ and a demonised ‘other’.
| Human security | ||
|---|---|---|
| Peacewomen – background narratives | News stories – foreground narratives | |
| Human security and wellbeing achieved through acts of unity, collectivity. | Human security achieved through power-plays between ‘champions’ and ‘demons’. | |
| • Collectivity: summoning healing strategies, reconciling with the other, weaving social safety nets, and building on the synergy of recovery. | • Duality: stressing divisive, oppositional, combative acts. Assignments of victors and vanquished. Reports of victories and defeats (eg Who is hurt, harmed or defeated? Who escapes harm, triumphs, ranks?) Distinguishing opposing sides, obstacles and barriers. | |
| • Generational awareness and sustenance: stewardship and longterm sustainability where there are multiple winners. | ||
| • Emphasis on hierarchical rank: winners and losers, scores and hierarchies. Heavy reliance on numbers and statistics. For example, sport and sporting spectacles. Naming individual stars or leaders in starring roles.335 |
In terms of sustained agency, women’s peacework is consistently occupied with building capacity, strengthening the ongoing pursuit of tangible results to address complex problems. In the media, sustained agency seems to disappear from view altogether. Instead, the emphasis is on images of victimhood and helplessness, where people are perpetually portrayed as being at the mercy of random, incoherent circumstances.
| Sustained agency | ||
|---|---|---|
| Peacewomen – background narratives | News stories – foreground narratives | |
| Sustained agency implies the capacity for ongoing pursuit of tangible results to address complex problems. | Sustained agency disappears altogether; instead media emphasis shifts perception to images and descriptions of victims of circumstance trapped in states of helplessness. | |
| •Acts of healing and reconciliation, including reports on collective wellbeing and on participatory and collaborative initiatives. Creation of proactive social safety nets. | • Reports of transitory or repetitive outbreaks of crime, violence, and atrocity. | |
| • Macro: long-term approaches to problems and problem-solving. | • Micro: short-term approach to problems and problem-solving. | |
| • Multidimensional: holistic approaches and social programs to address multiple faces of social problems. | • Uni-dimensional: fragmented and reactive programs and responses to social problems addressing a single facet at any given time.336 |
These categories contrast headline news (which currently frame human understanding of reality by featuring gendered information in the foreground) with peace narratives that unfold in the background, just outside our field of view. Consequently, the public remains unaware of peace performances, especially as enacted by global women on the world stage on a daily basis.
Yet these themes are simply starting points. The observations and conclusions that follow indicate a critical and immediate need for more in-depth research into such gendered journalism and a comprehensive examination of alternative news reporting strategies. Humanity requires more accurate and representative views of the full bandwidth of human performance, which allow us to reclaim a belief that peace and reconciliation are possible and to demonstrate the many ways in which these results are achievable on a global basis.
Since I began by questioning the trajectory of world history as viewed through the lens of ‘warrior theologies’, replete with violent clashes between ultimate good and ultimate evil, I want to return to the idea that there may in fact be other viewpoints that can help us shift this trajectory. I argue that, at present, the international news media reflect the dominant storylines as determined only by warriors in one form or another – economic, political and religious. In this sense:
• Public discourse depends exclusively on economic indicators to measure human progress, ignoring most, if not all, other indicators.337
• Mediated public discourse describes human security in terms of highly competitive and hierarchical powerplays between polarised forces (for example, religiously framed views of good and evil), which often rely on perpetuation or escalation of violence to affirm victory.
• Public discourse serves up fragmented incidents of victimisation (whether inflicted by human or natural causes) along with incoherent, short-term, and/or uni-dimensional propositions intended to fix or rescue the victims.
These findings are consistent with the foundational work of pioneering feminists where patriarchal systems are described as primarily valuing rational intellectual expression over emotional compassion; competitive power relationships and hierarchical rank over relational, collaborative structures; and labour performed in the public sphere over labour and productivity performed at home (in the private sphere) involving nurturing multiple generations (Harding 2003; Eisler 1995; Barlow 2000). What this study contributes to this august body of scholarship is explicit evidence that public media mirrors and intensifies prevailing values. It also finds that public audiences tolerate and often perpetuate this system at our own peril.
Globalisation of compassion requires a dramatic and immediate shift of focus, with a firm commitment to foregrounding stories of women’s peacebuilding activities. This approach requires fieldworkers to proactively engage international media to modify how news media is generated in our world, drawing on the global peace journalism movement of educators and activists. Among the thousands of gifted writers and producers of message streams are individuals of goodwill, who empathise in attempts to ‘ungender’ journalism so that it more closely resembles peace journalism. This study is a wake-up call to professionals to cease framing news as the exclusive dominion of warriors but rather, to highlight the empathic and compassionate province of the peaceable and, by so doing, to effect an essential paradigm shift away from ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ and toward ‘if it heals, it reveals’.338
Pragmatically, an incident in my local community illustrates the possibilities for precisely this type of change. For several consecutive years an Abrahamic Interfaith group has sponsored a community service project called Bloodbonds, a campaign that asks members of the Muslim, Christian and Jewish faith communities to affirm the strength of their common heritage by donating blood rather than shedding blood. During these campaigns, ToAHS (Tent of Abraham, Hagar and Sarah) has successfully filled the local hospital bloodmobile to capacity, in an unmistakable act of collective service. This past year I had the occasion to publicly address the managing editor of the local newspaper and propose a challenge. I asked the paper to proactively contribute to public awareness of collaboration and service represented by Bloodbonds as opposed to ‘business as usual’ with news features of sectarian and religious violence. The outcome was promising; the local paper conceded and featured stories both before and following the event, highlighting the collaborative effort among the three Abrahamic faith communities.
Worldwide, journalists are pivotal partners in influencing decisionmakers and reshaping opinions. Their commitment to healing and revealing stories means creatively re-crafting the steady deluge of information we listen to and see day after day. A synthesis of the findings of my study suggests at least six alternate and viable news strands comprising a tapestry of peace, which could contribute to ungendering the news environment. These categories provide frames for public discourse more in line with a true and rebalanced understanding of reality. These include:
• mending wounds and alleviating suffering
• weaving social safety nets
• crafting cultures of conflict resolution; repurposing cultures of violence
• creating innovative patterns and designs
• knitting together local and global
• affixing badges of honour to peace construction.
339I invite academics and activists, and producers and consumers of media, to collaborate in drawing attention to one or more of these strands. I argue that the timing for a new journalistic framework could not be better. Established news agencies and global networks are hungry to reinvent themselves, especially given intense pressure created by the internet’s ease of alternative information delivery. I encourage colleagues to look beyond underlying principles of persuasive rhetoric – devoted to establishing truth by ever escalating adversarial viewpoints. The outcome of this practice is a fixed perception of intractable conflict (Tannen 1998). I suggest re-imagined stories, constructed around Foss and Griffin’s notions of ‘invitational rhetoric’ (Foss & Griffin 1995). At the heart of this argument is a push for the strong amplification of healing and revealing news: stories of peace and reconciliation between former warriors and perceived enemies. Such a practice would serve well to divert energy away from elites and extremists alike, many who easily hijack the media to serve underlying agendas and many who have vested interest in sustaining conflict and inflammatory realities. The survival of our species would be far better served by shifting the focus to the rest of us who harbour intense longing and vested interest in long-term security and achievable peace.
There are strong indications that this shift is well underway, specifically attributable to the seeming unlimited reach of the internet. As mentioned before, a strong advocate of this point of view is Jeremy Rifkin, who discusses this shift in his latest book, The empathic civilisation: the race to global consciousness in a world in crisis (2009). In a January 2010 Huffington Post article, he heralds recent scientific discoveries that contradict previous assumptions that humans are naturally aggressive and self-serving:
Biologists and cognitive neuroscientists are discovering mirrorneurons – the so-called empathy neurons – that allow human beings and other species to feel and experience another’s situation as if it were one’s own. We are, it appears, the most social of animals and seek intimate participation and companionship with our fellows.340
Social scientists, in turn, are beginning to re-examine human history from an empathic lens and, in the process, discovering previously hidden strands of the human narrative which suggests that human evolution is measured not only by the expansion of power over nature, but also by the intensification and extension of empathy to more diverse others across broader temporal and spatial domains. (Rifkin 2010)
It appears that Rifkin’s book provides a new interpretation of the history of civilisation, as seen through this lens of human empathy (or what I refer to as compassion). Many feminists may read his book and his blog with a sigh of weary cynicism, exasperated with the scientific sector’s enormous ignorance of the body of research and proofs put forward by feminist scholars and activists for decades. The central notion of empathic human nature is not a new discovery for women, but has been woven throughout women’s culture, women’s rhetoric and women’s spirituality, and has been substantially documented by researchers from first-wave feminists through to the present day (Boulding 2000). Nevertheless, despite the long delay created by the untenable gender bias in research and academia, Rifkin does offer an interesting historical analysis of how empathy is extended by quantum developments in information distribution channels. He attempts to explain the mechanism ‘that allows empathic sensitivity to mature and consciousness to expand through history’:
Communication revolutions not only manage new, more complex energy regimes, but also change human consciousness in the process. Forager/hunter societies relied on oral communications and their consciousness was mythologically constructed. The great hydraulic agricultural civilisations were, for the most part, organised around script communication and steeped in theological consciousness. The first industrial revolution of the 19th century was managed by print communication and ushered in ideological consciousness. Electronic communication became the command and control mechanism for arranging the second industrial revolution in the 20th century and spawned psychological consciousness … By extending the central nervous system of each individual and the society as a whole, 341communication revolutions provide an ever more inclusive playing field for empathy to mature and consciousness to expand. (Rifkin 2010)
This astute analysis is an efficient characterisation of developments that rocked mankind throughout the grand sweep of history, accounting for the full gamut: clusters of hunter-gatherers, religious holy warriors and modern imperial regimes concentrating wealth and resources for their own benefit. However, it still lacks a cogent analysis of womankind’s activities during all this time. The history of civilisation, as described by Rifkin and countless other social analysts, is a recounting of the actions and reactions of warrior men. Unfortunately their stories dismiss thousands of vanquished indigenous civilisations that might have evolved quite differently; civilisations where qualities predominantly ascribed to women, whether presumed to be intrinsic or socially constructed, of nurturance, compassion and empathy, were well developed and highly regarded (Eisler 1995).
My conclusion is that the scientific elite, with the collusion of every form of recorded media, has systematically rendered the identifiable agency of women and their particular capacity for compassion completely invisible. For example, according to Rifkin, empathy was only recently ‘discovered’ by accident while observing the brainwaves of monkeys (Rifkin 2009). One can only wonder whether mirror neurons and the empathic nature of humanity might have been ‘discovered’ and acknowledged sooner if women had been considered worthy of research. Similarly, what other critically important scientific advancements are missing as a result of this oversight?
In the rush to ‘resurrect the global economy and revitalise the biosphere’ (Rifkin 2010), we can no longer afford persistent neglect of women’s agency; we are called upon to locate the consistent guides who have preserved and extended the boundaries of compassion through collective and revealing acts of healing: healing sisters and brothers; attending to allies and former enemies; reaching out in local communities and across borders; and, indeed, restoring mother earth herself. These women include the 1000 peacewomen across the globe studied here, and women across every continent and border.342
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1 To ‘rack focus’ is a term used by television news camera crews, literally meaning to change the focus of a single shot, for effect, while the camera is running. The effect sought is usually to connect an item in the foreground, conceptually, with one in the background of the shot – hence the viewer’s attention is directed first to the one, then to the other.