As I left the Nobel Women’s Initiative conference on women human rights defenders yesterday to head the conference of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), I was ruminating on an unresolved tension. How does the liberal conception of human rights, which places the individual are its core, sit with the collective consciousness that is necessary for peace?
I found the answer in the women around me. In her opening address to the 1,000 women who had travelled to The Hague from 80 different countries, Jody Williams, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997, declared that, like many of us, ‘when I hear anyone in a movement say “I” an awful lot, I get extremely nervous.’ She’s confident that the peace movement has to be about ‘we: us unarmed civilians coming together to change the world’. For Mairead Maguire, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976 for her work creating peace in Northern Ireland, the movement for peace and human rights is also a collective. ‘It’s a great mosaic’, she explains, ‘if once piece is taken away it can’t work. We are involved in an evolution of the human family, and a whole new way of living.’
Like a mosaic, the collective finds its strength in its individual parts, in the personal, and in individual dignity. This is a relationship, says Jody, that is best articulated in the concept of human security: ‘We women know what is security’, she asserts, ‘it’s food on the table, a house to live in, it’s access to medical care, it’s a dignified job so you can raise your children, it’s taking all that money put to weapons of death and putting in into welfare for a better world. That’s security’, she concludes, ‘it’s human security.’
