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# Women, Peace, and Security in the Cultural Sphere
- URL: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/women-peace-and-security-in-the-cultural-sphere/
- Published: 2005-10-05T10:10:23.000Z
- Updated: 2019-02-14T22:34:09.000Z
- Author: openDemocracy Supporters
- Tags: #en, #Migrated, #Import 2026-04-09 18:15

Entering this conversation as a documentary filmmaker and an academic in the areas  
of international politics, gender studies, and cultural studies, I spend  
a lot of time thinking about how gendered and sexualized people outside of the  
mainstream (usually women and queers) challenge mainstream understandings of  
peace and security through their everyday actions. In particular, I'm interested  
in how films, filmmaking, and web interventions break past conventional understandings  
of where politics occurs, beyond states and formal international organizations. This kind  
of thinking compliments the work of the many activist women blogging on this site,  
who strive to ensure that women are more equitably represented at all governmental  
decision-making levels and in extra-governmental mechanisms for the prevention,  
management, and resolution of conflict.

In considering 'women making a difference', I'm interested in how women use  
film and the web in efforts to promote peace and security. But I'm also interested  
in how these interventions by women are so often taken over by others to serve their  
own purposes. As a US citizen living and working in the UK, I pay a lot of  
attention to how mainstream discourses of peace and security coming from the  
Bush and the Blair adminstrations overwrite or obscure what these women are doing.

Let me give you an example. Did any of you see the film *Kandahar*? If you did, you  
probably remember this film as a devastating critique of all recent interventions  
into Afghanistan. These include critiques of the ideological struggle between the US  
and the USSR during the Cold War that played itself out in Afghanistan in the late 1970s  
as well as critiques of the subsequent implimentation of a fundamentalist interpretation  
of Islam imposed by the Taliban regime. This critical message about war as a way  
of imposing enlightenment was vividly portrayed in the film and explicitly stated in  
countless interviews with the film's director [Mohsen Makhmalbaf](http://www.makhmalbaf.com/movies.php?m=10&ref=opendemocracy.net) and the film's star  
Nelofer Pazira. Yet in spite of all this, the Bush administration used *Kandahar* as part  
of its justification of its war in Afghanistan. Implying that the film made the case for  
the urgent rescue of Afghan women by US and UK military forces, the Bush administration  
encouraged US citizens to view the film as a testimony to the hardships these women faced  
while imagining themselves supporting the military rescue of these women. In the struggle  
for the hearts and minds of US and UK citizens over how to think about the plight of  
Afghan women, the Bush and Blair administrations paraded first wives Laura Bush and  
Cheri Blair before the public to emphasize this official line. As women speaking  
on behalf of the human rights of Afghan women, [Laura Bush](http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/11/print/20011117.html?ref=opendemocracy.net) and Cheri Blair added  
legitimacy to the official foreign policies of the US and UK governments. In so doing,  
they participated in the occlusion of the message the film's star, collaborator, and  
conceiver of the story, Nelofer Pazira, hoped would reach the wider world --  
military intervention is not the answer in Afghanistan. 

Examples like this one demonstrate how the so-called cultural sphere is very much  
part and parcel of the so-called political sphere. But it also demonstrates the  
power of institutionalized voices like Presidents, Prime Ministers, and their wives  
to short-circuit powerful political interventions for their own purposes -- in this  
case, in support of military intervention rather than against it. In so doing, it  
supports the idea that women make a difference in politics, but it complicates what  
this difference might be and might do. Is it enough to increase women's participation  
as key decision-makers in or allied with instititionalized political organizations?   
Or is it necessary to think about what these women stand for? For, as this example  
demonstrations, the category of 'women' as stereotypically standing for those opposed  
to conflict and supporting peace almost immediately breaks down when we consider  
a real-world example involving real women.