Volunteers prepare to welcome 1,000 refugees at Dortmund station (Felix Huesmann/Demotix)In her excellent article referencing the refugee crisis, Jennifer Allsopp pointed to a fault line which social and cultural practice have tried hard to obscure. She noted the fact that "it is men who are the protagonists of the current refugee crisis. …they have begun to weave a new narrative around what it means to be vulnerable, to be a man and to be a refugee. They depict new masculinities of war that challenge the militarised assumptions…"
The role of nonviolent men: the possibility of an alternative narrative to that of men as warriors or as reluctant but participating foot soldiers to a cause, men who do not slavishly fall in behind regime or opposition. They have always existed as an inconvenient truth that the powerful know has the potential to undermine them - which is why traditional social and cultural mores vilify men who oppose violence as a means of conflict resolution as cowards and homosexuals, and, reflecting the gendered and misogynist assumptions around honour - condemns them as ‘women’.
This is not the only faultline that is being exposed by the recent exodus of refugees, particularly from Syria. Whoever gets to create a narrative gets to dictate the response.
