Gender, Armed Conflict and Political Violence

Gender, Armed Conflict and Political Violence

Description: "Background Paper by Cynthia Cockburn

Preface: gender is visible but mostly unseen

During the week of April 1999 in which I wrote this paper, two instances of armed violence were gripping the media, at one end and at the other in terms of scale. I am thinking of the micro-conflict that resulted in the massacre of twelve students and a teacher at the Columbine High School in Denver, Colorado, USA, and the macro-conflict in the Balkans in which ethnic aggression against people of Albanian culture from Kosova/a by the regime in Yugoslavia has elicited a violent bombardment of that country by the forces of NATO.

A nasty killing spree in a suburban school in a rich country that sees itself as a democracy - this may seem at first sight to be neither what is generally considered ‘armed conflict’, nor ‘political violence’. But this depends on how you see conflict and politics. We learned from news reports following the school massacre that Columbine High School was in fact a micro-political world made up of differentiated subcultures in acute conflict, and the young men who carried out the killings did so as members of one of these, inflicting terror on people seen as ‘different’ from themselves, as ‘other’. The subcultures were by no means dissociated from larger cultures and movements within US society. The weapons that were stockpiled in the family garage were produced by the armaments industry that stocked the arsenals of the US Air Force and the Yugoslav government."

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