12 thoughts on “3 | Gender, War, and the Everyday”
Anjana Donakonda
Swati’s perspective on how wars and “war bodies” inform international relations, particularly through her research from India and Sri Lanka, made me reflect on how violence is communicated. She emphasized that living inside a war, with its specific entry and exit points, presents an entirely different reality from the abstract narratives often portrayed in international relations. This reminded me of my own childhood experience living amid factionist violence—an intergenerational conflict between powerful families in my constituency. I witnessed bomb blasts and murders, including a blast just 100 meters from my home. Despite the violence, I continued attending school and visiting neighbors who supported one of the factionists’ family including weapon handling like guns and hand granites but treated me like family. Much like how documentaries and films on LTTE, Kashmir, factionists and Bihar overlook the everyday resilience of those living in these conflict zones, international relations could miss the narrative on nuances of these lived experiences.
Reading Alex’s story, as told by Katie, was heart-wrenching and left me grappling with the haunting question: Was Alex’s only fault his birth? His journey through relentless atrocities at every stage of life made me wonder how someone can endure endless violence, even in so-called “safe spaces.” I was particularly moved by the author’s words: “Violence is not simply a transgression of the body’s physical boundaries; at a deeper level, it is a violation of selfhood and the position from which one may speak.” Having interviewed several survivors, I can relate to the post-traumatic lives of victims who are caught in a vicious cycle of violence. This leaves deep scars on their sense of self, eventually leading to a loss of selfhood. They often become immune to physical pain, forced to make “choiceless choices.” In an era where platforms advocate for international human rights, equity, and inclusion, it’s important to pause and reflect on Alex’s story: Are we truly doing enough?
Davila and Maria’s article on vital encounters resonated deeply with me, especially in relation to the daily insecurities that women endure and how these aspects are deeply intertwined in their lives. The concept of vital encounters, as explained by the authors, made me reflect on how routine interactions and interdependencies—originally aimed at meeting immediate needs—ultimately have broader communal and political significance. I can relate this to the way women in India are often systematically portrayed and made dependent on male decision-making. Many women I know, who endure toxic marriages including domestic violence, often respond to the question, “Why do you still choose to endure this?” with the explanation of lacking financial independence. Even those who are financially independent face discouragement from leaving due to the communal significance of being married, which is tied to their participation in social rituals and functions. Marriage in India, then, has a political significance for women, being framed as crucial for their survival, well-being, and security as it is still believed being a spinster is worse than death. In this sense, the personal and political are deeply connected, with routine activities like marriage becoming essential processes for community survival and long-term reconstruction .
The questions that I got in mind are as follows:
In an era of data-driven decision-making, where issues are often reduced to quantifiable metrics, how can feminist perspectives be integrated into the analytics used for compartmentalizing complex social problems?
How can we create a world where individuals like Alex do not suffer or feel regret simply because of their birth? More importantly, what role can policy play in breaking the vicious cycles of violence and to create a true sense of security for all?
A concept that stood out to me this week is how women’s psychological spaces can be infiltrated by colonial violence, manifested through debilitating mental health conditions like anxiety and depression. Shaloub-Kevorkian (2015)’s article on Palestinian women’s experiences of pregnancy and childbirth in Occupied East Jerusalem (oEJ) was an illuminating account of how the study of ‘war bodies’ is highly political and gendered, and how the experience of colonial violence permeates multiple aspects of everyday life. I tied the stories from this article to Mra and Hedström (2024) and the women-led protests in the Myanmar Spring Revolution. In Myanmar, menstruation was often used as a psychological tactic to shame, humiliate, and punish women activists who were imprisoned, with authorities forcing them to menstruate in their clothes.
Parashar (2013) points to the difficulty of international relations (IR) in centring bodies/humans/lives in the study of war. A preoccupation with state relationships and timelines risks negating the beating hearts that bear witness to the seeds of conflict and eventually live and breathe its reality. “People live in wars, with wars, and war lives with them long after it ends (pg. 618).” Feminist IR understands that there are minds and souls attached to these bodies and communities that stem from them—that they are not just objects to be observed in relation to their environments; rather, they are active actors in said environments with feelings and histories that predate their experiences of conflict. All this history influences each person’s reactions to violence, affecting how they experience sadness, pain, grief, anger, and empathy. Therefore, psychological spaces among hyper-visible actors are powerful because while they can be affected by externalities, they cannot be restrained like physical bodies. People retain ownership of their emotions and narratives of war in this way.
The Israeli colonial project of preventing Palestinian births by way of biopolitical violence in making healthcare inaccessible and non-inclusive to Palestinian women is also psychological warfare. Shaloub-Kevorkian (2015) notes how pregnant Palestinian women’s anxieties about reaching checkpoints and giving birth in the oEJ enter their subconscious and manifest in nightmares. While awake, they are consumed by their fears of losing their babies, leaving their small children to give birth, facing Israeli authority, and getting arrested. As they lay down to sleep, it is no different. In Myanmar, women, steeped in their anger towards a patriarchal military rule, launched naked protests to disturb gender norms surrounding the respectability attached to womanhood and the sexual availability of female bodies to men (Mra and Hedström, 2024). Every day they are mobilized by their feelings of pain, anger, and hope as they resist a world that renders them inferior simply for being women. They are not interested in ironing out the beginnings and endings of the conflict they endure as most IR researchers are, Parashar (2013) notes. The urgency lies in where they take their bodies, how they carry themselves, and what they do to survive. In experiencing violence every day, bodies become maps of conflict and resistance, their psyche the compass.
Questions:
How can a perceived distinction between mind and body be dangerous in the context of experiencing war and gender in the ‘everyday’?
What are other ways in which women’s bodies are appropriated in colonial projects and feared in revolutions?
I have two big takeaways from this week’s readings. Firstly, I need to stop doing readings for this course in public spaces because I keep tearing up (they are great readings though!) Secondly, Parashar’s analysis of how the integration of embodied experiences into International Relations (IR) critiques the field’s abstraction of war, emphasizing the lived realities of those affected. She argues that IR overlooks these lived, bodily experiences. From these readings, I am beginning to understand how incorporating the experiences of “war bodies” into IR would challenge its abstract focus and provide a deeper understanding of conflict. War is a daily reality for many, not an exceptional event, and IR must account for the human experiences that shape it.
Parashar argues that war is not a disruption of daily life, but rather a “way of living and daily performance” (2013, 618), with some actors are there by choice, and others not. This in turn shapes identities and communities at both the local and global level. In the documentary, My Daughter, the Terrorist, Antonia, the mother of an LTTE fighter, asks, “How can you study war without understanding what it means to people?” (Antoinia in Parashar, 2013, 619). This highlights the gap in IR’s understanding of war’s daily realities; ‘war bodies,’ including refugees and civilians, embody international relations in ways that IR fails to recognize. For instance, refugees often prioritize basic survival over extraordinary events, yet these ‘banal moments’ are typically ignored by IR (Parashar, 2013, 618). I feel that this quote from Parashar captures her argument: “The beginnings of war are in the banal, in the everyday acquisition of tribal lands and forests, in daily encroachments on the property of the poor, in the brutality of the police and security forces, in a sudden suicide bomb attack that visits people’s lives as they go about their mundane daily chores” (2013, 620). This perspective challenges IR’s focus on state actors, drawing attention to the human costs of conflict.
The other readings support Parashar’s argument, and discuss how women and other people’s embodied experiences in conflict zones reveal the gendered dynamics of resistance. In Myanmar, women creatively resist military oppression by using gendered symbols like bras in protests, and even their own bodies. One protester remarked that as they have no weapons, their abilities lie in discomfort with the female body when used for protest, remarking that ““[w]e have no weapons to harm them [police and soldiers], but anything that worries or delays them is our weapon” (Frontier Myanmar, February 16, 2021 in Mra and Hedström, 2024, 769). Despite facing sexual violence, women’s leadership persists, challenging military and patriarchal norms. Similarly, Palestinian women navigate military checkpoints and biopolitical control over their reproductive rights, resisting through everyday acts of defiance. There is a complex relationship between their bodies and resistance, wherein their wombs are seen as ‘weapons’ in the ongoing fight against a colonial power, and a threat to the colonial state itself (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2015, 1190).
This reminded me of something I learned in an undergraduate course, where the professor mentioned that female suicide bombers in Palestine disguise explosives under the guise of pregnancy. Knowing that professor’s political views, I was skeptical of this being an epidemic or pattern as he indicated, rather than a few isolated incidents. When reflecting this week, I looked further into this issue and found an interesting article criticizing the perceived threat of female Muslim bodies in the post 9-11 period, specifically an article released by the US Department of Homeland Security in 2008 on the topic. The authors define this perceived threat of ‘mom-bombs’ or cross-dressing men hiding bombs under female clothing as a new orientalist orientation against both female and queer bodies. They argue that depictions of “the pregnant terrorist body as treacherous ‘containers paved the way for representations of the pregnant terrorist body as a national security threat” (Magnet and Mason, 2014, 199). This illustrates how gendered bodies in war-zones are seen both as social and literal weapons, leading to dehumanization and everyday mistreatment.
Questions:
What are the implications of viewing bodies as both symbols and weapons in resistance movements?
How can the integration of embodied experiences in IR transform our understanding of conflict, particularly in terms of humanitarian aid decisions and peace negotiations?
I want to begin by acknowledging that this is a more vulnerable post. My thoughts have been scattered over the past few days, and while this may not directly answer the questions or topics at hand, I hope at least one of my peers gains something from it.
This morning, I woke up to three notifications from Al Jazeera about Israel launching airstrikes on Lebanon. As I read through the headlines, I noticed a familiar and chilling pattern, where each update brought news of increasing casualties and injuries. The 3:45 am report mentioned 50 dead and 300 wounded. By 5:55 am, that number had escalated to 182 killed and 727 wounded. The final article reported that Israel’s airstrikes were no longer confined to Hezbollah territory in Southern Lebanon and Beirut neighbourhoods, but had spread to Eastern Lebanon as well.
Two days ago, I called my mother who currently lives in Lebanon with my father. I expressed my concern for her, asking her to stay safe and be vigilant due to the increasing risks of war. Her response to me was “Layla, it’s fine. I’m fine. They’re targeting Hezbollah, not us. Stop worrying so much.” Her nonchalant response hit me, made me upset, and I couldn’t shake it off until I read Swati Parashar’s work on war bodies. Her words “people live in wars, with wars, and war lives with them long after it ends,” struck me as they echoed what I had always known about my parents. War is not just something that happened around them; it is what made them who they are. I have just lived a privileged enough life, one that I owe entirely to my parents, which grants me the privilege to worry about them from this distance.
As I read more from Parashar and Shalhoub-Kevorkian, I began to recognize the complex relationship between violence, the human body and wars, demonstrating that war isn’t just fought with weapons and armies. That it’s fought through the lived experiences and bodies of civilians, particularly women, whose bodies can either be sites of violence and war, or sites of resistance. My parents’ familiarity with violence rooted in their experience during the Civil War, speaks to this. For them, the sound of missiles, the fear of hunger and death, and the disruption of daily life was routine, so much so that this disruption became an expectation. This violence has shaped them, but it does not define them. They don’t see themselves as victims of war, but as a mother and a father, Lebanese citizens, an engineer and accountant who love music, cooking, dancing, and their Lebanese culture.
What continues to deeply trouble me however is how the stories of people such as my parents – people who live through these wars, are parts of the wars- are often left untold or unexplored. Their lived experiences get overlooked, reduced to statistics and political strategies, as presented by Mra & Hedström. The media and politicians tend to focus on casualty counts, political gains, and losses, while neglecting the personal narratives that expose the human cost of conflict. This is harmful to women and children, whose bodies are often portrayed as passive victims, stripped of dignity and autonomy, as exemplified by the image of the Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, whose lifeless body was plastered across countless articles. In an interview with the Guardian, Alan Kurdi’s aunt stated, “don’t concentrate only on my family. Why are thousands of other Syrians in Turkey also so desperate? Why do they want to leave?” Her words highlight how the experiences of individuals are pushed aside in favor of broader geopolitical discussions, reinforcing narratives that overlook how war disproportionately affects women and children. This tragic image of Alan did capture global attention, but it also underscores how vulnerable groups, especially women, bear the brunt of this violence—not only as victims but also as agents whose stories and resistance are too often forgotten or ignored.
What would it mean to shift our understanding of war to encompass the lived experiences of those affected? How can we begin to acknowledge the psychological and physical toll that bodies endure in the pursuit of political objectives? At what point did we start to treat bodies as instruments of psychological warfare, and why do we allow these known abuses to continue unchecked? Why are women continuously affected by this violence, and what are the implications of viewing them solely as victims or agents in the context of gendered violence during conflict?
This quote from Parashar’s article also stuck with me: ‘We were better prepared for death than for life.’ reminding me how lucky I am and how affected others are.
My grandfather was Ukrainian. He was the youngest of a large family. Most of his siblings died in either Holodomor or in the army. My grandfather eventually left Ukraine – according to my dad, grandpa decided that “he was next if he didn’t get out of there,” and he lived in Germany and then eventually Canada. My father was born and raised in Canada and so was I. I do not speak Ukrainian, aside from a few phrases. I lived in Ukraine for six months in 2019-20. During this time I made friends and found family members from the one remaining branch of my family in Ukraine.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion into Ukraine, I had a number of family members and friends reach out to me to discuss the conflict. Often, they wanted to talk about the war from an abstracted geopolitical lens, though sometimes they asked me about my personal connections there.
I didn’t know how to respond to these questions and still don’t. I feel far enough removed from my Ukrainian heritage that the grief and anger does not feel as though it is fully mine, however I nonetheless have trouble having abstracted conversations about the conflict. Ultimately, I know that Ukraine must win the war because my family and friends are Ukrainian. That’s all.
In a similar way, I don’t know how to discuss the readings from this week. I don’t know how to abstract from personal stories to bring discussions to an academic setting.
I saw some of this reflected in the readings from this week. For example, when Parashar stated, “People who fight/suffer/live inside wars do not worry about how wars begin and end (causes and consequences), for either they know the answers or know where to look for answers.” (Parashar, 2013, 617). But I struggled with other portions of the readings. For example, in the next paragraph, Parashar says, “Those who enter into war also find ways to live with it and get out of it.” (Parashar, 2013, 617). What about my grandfather’s five siblings and his father who did not live with it and get out of it? What about the fact that, because of war, my grandfather’s children and grandchildren did not speak any of the first four languages he spoke, isolating him to speaking with his own family in his fifth language? Many do not live with it and get out of it. For those that do, nothing is the same.
Maybe I am missing the point. I know the point was to engage with war as something deeply personal and also mundane for many people. But I don’t know how to do that, even from within my own family. My grandfather very rarely, if ever spoke of his wartime experiences. Who am I to take those, or anyone else’s story, for that matter, to a setting in which it will be scrutinized in order to produce academic knowledge?
The mundane: A walk to a pizza shop with a sibling
On the night I arrived to Libya last year my cousin was recounting the stories of the girls we went to school with (who was married now and who with child). I was remembering the passing of a classmate’s brother. Her name was Salsabil. I do not remember her brother’s name. My cousin had forgotten how he passed. I was visiting after a ten year absence from this land and it remained in my memory.
He was murdered in broad daylight in 2014 on a walk to go get pizza with his sister. The story is marked in my mind as one of the many reasons why we had to leave Libya at that time. How precarious were our lives once catastrophe struck so close? Whenever I remember the story, I can see Salsabil running. The murderer was intending her next as his target. And I see her in my mind perhaps in her home, where I attended my first funeral on behalf of a friend, the Quran and melancholy heavy in our palms. Or in our gray and pink uniforms as she recounted to us in our eighth grade class, how she ran and found refuge in a neighbour’s home. That she pounded the door, and somehow between breaths of utter devastation she was only able to say she was being chased. The details are palpable, I find myself becoming quiet catapulted to a different time.
And as I reminded my cousin of this story… she laughs. In Arabic she responds:
“I had forgotten all of this to be honest. We’ve lived a lot of life since then. But I can tell that you’re still there.”
In retrospect. my cousin illuminated how security is produced and reproduced through the engagement with the political landscape regardless of its being a locus of insecurity. People’s lives continue and they live the ordinary lives despite the risk of its permeation.
As I parsed through this week’s readings, I thought of how war permeated my every day. The experience of war at home versus in public spaces was distinctly shaped by the architectures of security. It was unsafe for a girl to go outside. My every day routines had to be in the confines of four walls. Survival and safety resulted in the livelihood practice of baking, I managed risk measuring flour, sugar, and butter and rejoicing in having family members revel at my talents over tea when the lights would go out. Ordinary life necessitates a rhythm despite the singular moments of disruption and I found myself becoming more grateful to my cousin’s comment—that perhaps there is hope in the cranies of that rhythm—marriages, new borns, graduations and so much more. That looking to the future we still have reasons to rejoice.
I went to an all-girl catholic school in Mexico, and the congregation is present in many states of the country, including Michoacan. Michoacan is a state that is de-facto run by the several cartels that operate within its borders, and yet people find a way to continue living. In discussing how war is not necessarily a disruption of the everyday but rather it becomes a new everyday, I think about how the nuns in Michoacan need to constantly interact with cartel members. It can be as simple of an interaction of going to the house next door asking if they had some extra fruit they could buy, and the nuns having to walk through halls and rooms with men in balaclavas and guns out in the open. For me, this would definitely not be considered my everyday life but for the nuns, and for the people living in Michoacan it is. Yet, under IR standards, would these people living in Michoacan be considered sympathizers to the cartels? Would they be considered victims? Or how exactly would academia want to categorize the people living in these contexts?
The question that Parashar asks in regards to Antonia’s story, “how can you study war as causes and consequences, without understanding human experience and what war means to people” (619), I think is reflective of how academia has come to understood war. Parashar also touches on how International Relations (IR) as a field of study, has become way too concerned with numbers and figures in order to explain a conflict, and struggle to entertain the idea that there are people who have lived and survived wars that do not fit within the expectations of what IR and academia in general have come to understand of who are the survivors.
I think about the stories of women in Germany during the liberation and immediate post-WWII years, stories of rape and sexual assault perpetrated by soldiers from the Allied powers. The identities of perpetrator and victim were blurred, and even if they were to speak about what had happened to them, even if they were to be believed that they experienced a violation of their bodies, it did not matter because at the end of the day, they represented the enemy. Of course, there is also the gender-based violence of these acts, that goes beyond the aspects of war in the form of the entitlement to women’s bodies. War has always had a gender dimension that is not always acknowledged and makes it even more difficult to understand the lived experiences of people who have lived and continue living in such contexts.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian talks about the settler-colonial state and the violence it inflicts on Palestinian women. It made me reflect on the very definition of “war”. While yes, there is the most accepted definition of it (“a state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations” according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary), I think about my own experiences in Mexico, and how the State has waged war against women, from deciding to not investigate into the femicides (it is estimated that 10 women are killed every day, most often by a male partner) or into the thousands of women who have disappeared and who the government quite literally erased from the statistics (almost a year ago, there was a “revision” of the national registry of cases of missing women in which the official number went from 110,000 to just 12 thousand), or how the public health care system has systematically performed tubal ligations on indigenous women without their knowledge or consent.
Question:
Maybe I am approaching the questions I am supposed to come up with this week in the wrong way, because at the end of the day, I feel like I am asking the same questions the readings are trying to address but they leave me at the same time with questions of what exactly is war? Who are the survivors? How can academia, historically violent, can even come close to explaining and understanding the lived experiences of people who have lived through war?
This week’s readings have deepened my understanding of war studies by emphasizing the importance of everyday experiences in conflict zones, a perspective I had previously overlooked. Parashar highlights the disconnect between International Relations (IR) and the realities of war, as IR often focuses on state-centered analyses while neglecting the lived, emotional, and gendered experiences of individuals. This gap means that IR theory fails to capture the full reality of conflict. Parashar argues that a feminist perspective can bridge this gap by focusing on the personal dimensions of war, recognizing that women, children, and marginalized groups are active participants, not just passive victims. This human-centered approach fosters empathy and enriches our understanding of conflict, moving the field beyond purely theoretical analysis to a more compassionate view that integrates real-life experiences.
McQuaid’s work reinforces the idea that marginalized groups are not passive victims but active participants, highlighting the resilience and agency of individuals like Alex. Despite enduring multiple layers of violence—being orphaned, assaulted, discriminated against, and displaced—Alex navigates life with remarkable strength. His ability to build social networks, even in hostile environments like refugee camps, and his evolving identity as an LGBTQ+ refugee emphasize the importance of recognizing the agency of those often portrayed as mere victims in humanitarian narratives. This challenges the oversimplified “victim” framework frequently applied to sexual minorities in conflict zones, urging us to view them as active participants in their survival and advocacy. McQuaid’s work also reveals that violence extends beyond physical acts, affecting social, psychological, and institutional spheres. For marginalized individuals, violence is an ongoing reality, deeply embedded in everyday life, especially for those marginalized by ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. This expands our understanding of violence, prompting us to acknowledge its many forms, including structural violence, which are often overlooked.
Reading Mra and Hedstrom prompted me to reflect on how women in Myanmar utilized their bodies and gendered symbols, such as htamein (women’s undergarment) and sanitary products, as forms of resistance against the military regime. These symbols, often associated with shame or impurity, were creatively repurposed to challenge deep-rooted patriarchal norms, transforming cultural beliefs into tools for undermining authority. This defiance illustrates how women’s bodies, often sites of social and political control, can also symbolize empowerment. The protests also highlight the intersection of physical and digital activism, with women using online platforms to share images of their bruised bodies and campaigning with red lipstick and raised fists. This approach shows how modern movements can transcend borders and amplify local struggles on a global scale. Moreover, it reveals how women’s bodies are often entangled in issues of race, nationalism, and control. The military’s use of gendered violence reinforces both political oppression and ethnic hierarchies. Yet, these protests demonstrate that women’s bodies, rather than being passive sites of control, can serve as powerful symbols of resistance and survival.
Questions:
How can we reconcile the emotional and personal dimensions of war with the more abstract theories in IR and war studies to create a more holistic understanding of conflict?
What impact does cultural practices and symbols have on resistance efforts and how can they bring marginalized groups together?
Niromi’s story is one that made me stop and thinking about how there are tons of people in many parts of the world that currently live everyday lives where the state of war is completely normalized. It is something that makes me reflect on my privilege in residing in the Western world or Northern hemisphere, where peace has been present for virtually my entire life. I have friends who get scared of firecrackers, meanwhile people who find themselves in situations like Niromi’s where hearing bomb explosions or seeing dead bodies (Parashar, 2013, p. 618) was perceived as the norm.
One takeaway had which is a point I fully agreed with from Parashar’s article is that we need to study and theorize war differently. Rather than a top-down approach which focuses on the actions of states, institutions, and people in power while viewing commoners only as mere numbers, we should look at war from a bottom-up approach. Those that lived through war know best about how it has influenced them, and they are crucial for constructing an accurate war narrative (Parashar, 2013, p. 626).
The reading that caught most of my attention and shocked me to the core was Butalia’s ‘Community, State and Gender: On Women’s Agency during Partition’ (1993). It took me longer than usual to read through all the pages due to the graphic and explicit content. It also made me a bit emotional imagining what women and children went through during the Partition of India. Women and children not only went through an impeccable amount of trauma for years, if they were lucky enough to not be killed, they were likely abducted, (forcibly or non-forcibly) converted, and started new lives with men that already prayed on them. Many of them were then asked by their State and community to return back ‘home’, and understandably not all of them wanted to re-live trauma and re-start (Butalia, 1993, p. 20) once again after what they went through. All their experiences were difficult to read through as I could never truly understand what women and children who suffered with all these traumas went through. Those that did want to go back were often not allowed to by their own family or community too, mostly in the name of ‘purity’, ‘honour’, or ‘religion’. It disgusts me when I think about how women (not just during the Partition, but historically) were treated as property by men in their families, communities, and the state. Women in these cases were not treated like human, especially when it came to their autonomy. Many if not all their decisions regarding their bodies and lives were made by men, if not, strongly coerced by expectations and standards set by men. Women that made their own decision to jump in wells to preserve their ‘honour’ or ‘purity’ did not do so out of their own free will, it was a decision they made under the influence of living their entire lives under the standards, expectations, and teachings of their religion, family, community, and so on. Meanwhile, men had next to none of these same standards, and men that married women of other religions were definitely not shunned as much as women that did so.
The reading reminded me of an old website I found which was the first time I ever read articles on the Partition of India. It is a website that I think some people here would like to read it if they had not heard of it before. It is ‘https://in.1947partitionarchive.org/’, an archive that is expanding daily to include more stories about this event (men’s stories are included too). I thought it would be okay to share this as this fascinated me when I found it.
My questions that I formed while reading Butalia’s article were regarding a point of theirs in their writing. The author wrote about the need to know more about the women who took their own lives, or ‘offered’ themselves as sacrifice (p. 19). I know it is a very dark question to ask, but the moment I read that, my mind immediately asked ‘How could one even do that?’ and ‘How can people find out more about those women?’ due to the nature of what the author talks about. I feel like there is not much more one can do to know the story of someone who made the decision to take their own life seven decades ago.
I would like to first admit that I am mostly uncomfortable acknowledging the existence of the/my body as anything other than a little racecar driving my brain from room to room.
I have been thinking a lot this month about the distance that IR puts between the academy and the entire world and the condemnation of any proximity between academic “observers” of International Relations (proper noun) and international relations, relationships and relationality as inadequately academic. I think last week I said I felt like we had all been duped into thinking objectivity was ever really real and that the objectivity we are trained to revere is shaped by systemic bias and not really objective at all. This might have been a little dramatic, but it makes me wonder whether all this enforced distance is a legacy of cyclical academic culture or whether it serves a purpose I don’t want to or can’t see.
Reading Mra and Hedström and McQuaid makes me think, cynically, that some of the reason IR demands such distance is to maintain a semblance of plausible deniability, demanding to “be the innocent bystander” (Parashar 618). If IR does not have to be close to war, practitioners seldom have to consider whether war is a condition of everyday life or an interruption (only, as Parashar points out, how wars start and end). Parashar argues that the relevance of bodies to the discipline of IR is that “war bodies and the war dead there for construct the international in various ways” (623). The body in war is constructed as significant only as a symbol or as a numerical indicator of a war’s magnitude. In IR, the body in wartime is so different from the body in peacetime. We don’t think of wartime bodies as ever like, needing a Tums. The body is imagined only in its proximity to the conflict, helping uphold the idea that war is not an everyday occurrence but an interruption of mundanity.
In doing so, IR obscures the truths that academics want to find. I really believe that, for the most part, we as academics really do want to find truths. In our lives, if I want to know the truth about something happening in my family, I would not put distance between us and hope to observe from a distance. I would ask my favourite and most well-informed cousin, and then maybe a few others I could trust. Their experience in these relationships is what is true and all the different relationalities at play inform the truths we seek to find. Not to compare my family dynamic to international conflict, but the same could be said of conflict and war in IR. There are more truths about how war IS (not how it starts or ends) in Alex’s story than in the pictures on the news or the theories in the books. The effect of war on the body is not happening only in the “moments of overt physical violence that occur within and because of protracted political conflicts” (McQuaid 570) just as war is not just what is shown on BBC.
Anyway, this week left me with lots of questions. I asked my therapist today, somewhat comedically and in reference to this class: did you know that if you really take dedicated time to reflect on information and feelings, you build all these connections between different concepts and realities? And she said, “yeah, welcome!”
1. In the stories told within these articles, a theme of multiple truths emerges prominently (i.e. Alex’s stories about being both part of and apart from communities and the effects that this has). To what degree does academia/IR afford itself multiple truths and how can we account for multiple truths in our own work?
2. What is the business of IR in the everydayness of war? What importance does the mundanity of conflict impart?
While reading “The politics of birth and the intimacies of violence against Palestinian women in occupied East Jerusalem” by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, I couldn’t help but recall a disturbing comment made by a student I had met during my undergraduate degree. With no sense of remorse, he joked about encouraging settlers in Israel to have more babies in order to facilitate the “Palestinian push”–the displacement and erasure of Palestinians from their homeland. The birthing Native women stands in the way of this push, and as evidenced by the temporal, spatial, psychological, and physical violence inflicted upon Palestinian women, terrifies the colonial administration (Shelhoub-Kevorkian 1188).
Having many family members, close and distant, who have given birth or been pregnant in the past few years, I have seen how traumatizing birth, miscarriage, and health scares during pregnancy can be under the best of circumstances. I cannot fathom the grief, fear, and turbulence that comes from being unable to access family support, particularly in cultures where multiple generations of a family are expected to come together to support a pregnant person. Alex’s fear of going to the hospital due to his gender/sexual minority status (as written about in Katie McQuaid’s “Violent continuities: telling stories of one sexual minority life in the African Great Lakes region”) overlaps with a conundrum Palestinian women and their support systems face upon going to the hospital: will their need to access healthcare result in their arrest? (McQuaid 579). If their community does decide to accompany them to surveilled institutions, will their family and friends be imprisoned or discriminated against based upon sexuality or race?
Apart from disfigurement or lifelessness, upon completing the above readings, I think that “war bodies” also encompass bodies that are forced to act against their nature out of fear for being persecuted. Aida preventing herself from giving birth until she reaches Jerusalem is an example of this fight against the natural (Shelhoub-Kevorkian 1194), a war inside one’s own body where the scars and long-lasting traumas are more hidden. In love, Alex and Guillaume were attacked for a natural desire for sexual intimacy (McQuaid 580).
Thus, my question for this week is, in what other ways do “war bodies” emerge internally, as a necessity for protection of self and the ones we love?
A theme that stood out to me was how women can use their gendered roles as a means of resistance and protest. Mra and Henström’s (2024) describe the Myanmar Spring Revolution. The article describes how women reclaimed gender norms as a form of protest. Parashar (2013) states, “theoretical impulse has been to see women as victims and mourners in patriarchal wars; these women had stories that were about their own personal involvement in wars; stories that could be woven into narratives about how traditional gender roles did not keep women away from war and violence” (pg. 626). I thought back to this particular quote when reading Shalhoub-Kevorkia (2014) article about pregnant Palestinian women in occupied East Jerusalem. In the case of these women, their gendered roles as mothers and “biological reproducers” (pg. 1190) places them directly in the line of violence. Women in the article face violence just trying to get the care they need. Women describe the desire for their children to be born in certain hospitals based on their location. These women cross checkpoints and put themselves at risk so their children can be born in a location that would grant them access to a Jerusalemite ID card. These women may not be directly involved in armed conflict or resistance movements, but their actions as pregnant women navigating around state control to me represents a form of resistance. These women are not passive actors, they are actively resisting the imposed control on their bodies and movement to grant their children as much freedom and opportunity as they can.
Another thought I had while reading Parashar (2013) article was connected to the section about the politics of mourning. Back in April World Central Kitchen workers were killed in Gaza. These aid workers were all over the news, I identified with pictures accompanied by quotes given to by their friends and family. The news sparked international attention and backlash towards Israel and led to the dismissal of two Israeli officers. Israel’s Prime Minister is quoted in an article describing the event as “tragic”. I am struggling to wrap up this chain of thought but maybe my question after this week’s readings is, how have the politics of morning played out in the Israeli-Gaza conflict? How have the politics of mourning shaped how we understand past and ongoing conflicts?
Swati’s perspective on how wars and “war bodies” inform international relations, particularly through her research from India and Sri Lanka, made me reflect on how violence is communicated. She emphasized that living inside a war, with its specific entry and exit points, presents an entirely different reality from the abstract narratives often portrayed in international relations. This reminded me of my own childhood experience living amid factionist violence—an intergenerational conflict between powerful families in my constituency. I witnessed bomb blasts and murders, including a blast just 100 meters from my home. Despite the violence, I continued attending school and visiting neighbors who supported one of the factionists’ family including weapon handling like guns and hand granites but treated me like family. Much like how documentaries and films on LTTE, Kashmir, factionists and Bihar overlook the everyday resilience of those living in these conflict zones, international relations could miss the narrative on nuances of these lived experiences.
Reading Alex’s story, as told by Katie, was heart-wrenching and left me grappling with the haunting question: Was Alex’s only fault his birth? His journey through relentless atrocities at every stage of life made me wonder how someone can endure endless violence, even in so-called “safe spaces.” I was particularly moved by the author’s words: “Violence is not simply a transgression of the body’s physical boundaries; at a deeper level, it is a violation of selfhood and the position from which one may speak.” Having interviewed several survivors, I can relate to the post-traumatic lives of victims who are caught in a vicious cycle of violence. This leaves deep scars on their sense of self, eventually leading to a loss of selfhood. They often become immune to physical pain, forced to make “choiceless choices.” In an era where platforms advocate for international human rights, equity, and inclusion, it’s important to pause and reflect on Alex’s story: Are we truly doing enough?
Davila and Maria’s article on vital encounters resonated deeply with me, especially in relation to the daily insecurities that women endure and how these aspects are deeply intertwined in their lives. The concept of vital encounters, as explained by the authors, made me reflect on how routine interactions and interdependencies—originally aimed at meeting immediate needs—ultimately have broader communal and political significance. I can relate this to the way women in India are often systematically portrayed and made dependent on male decision-making. Many women I know, who endure toxic marriages including domestic violence, often respond to the question, “Why do you still choose to endure this?” with the explanation of lacking financial independence. Even those who are financially independent face discouragement from leaving due to the communal significance of being married, which is tied to their participation in social rituals and functions. Marriage in India, then, has a political significance for women, being framed as crucial for their survival, well-being, and security as it is still believed being a spinster is worse than death. In this sense, the personal and political are deeply connected, with routine activities like marriage becoming essential processes for community survival and long-term reconstruction .
The questions that I got in mind are as follows:
In an era of data-driven decision-making, where issues are often reduced to quantifiable metrics, how can feminist perspectives be integrated into the analytics used for compartmentalizing complex social problems?
How can we create a world where individuals like Alex do not suffer or feel regret simply because of their birth? More importantly, what role can policy play in breaking the vicious cycles of violence and to create a true sense of security for all?
A concept that stood out to me this week is how women’s psychological spaces can be infiltrated by colonial violence, manifested through debilitating mental health conditions like anxiety and depression. Shaloub-Kevorkian (2015)’s article on Palestinian women’s experiences of pregnancy and childbirth in Occupied East Jerusalem (oEJ) was an illuminating account of how the study of ‘war bodies’ is highly political and gendered, and how the experience of colonial violence permeates multiple aspects of everyday life. I tied the stories from this article to Mra and Hedström (2024) and the women-led protests in the Myanmar Spring Revolution. In Myanmar, menstruation was often used as a psychological tactic to shame, humiliate, and punish women activists who were imprisoned, with authorities forcing them to menstruate in their clothes.
Parashar (2013) points to the difficulty of international relations (IR) in centring bodies/humans/lives in the study of war. A preoccupation with state relationships and timelines risks negating the beating hearts that bear witness to the seeds of conflict and eventually live and breathe its reality. “People live in wars, with wars, and war lives with them long after it ends (pg. 618).” Feminist IR understands that there are minds and souls attached to these bodies and communities that stem from them—that they are not just objects to be observed in relation to their environments; rather, they are active actors in said environments with feelings and histories that predate their experiences of conflict. All this history influences each person’s reactions to violence, affecting how they experience sadness, pain, grief, anger, and empathy. Therefore, psychological spaces among hyper-visible actors are powerful because while they can be affected by externalities, they cannot be restrained like physical bodies. People retain ownership of their emotions and narratives of war in this way.
The Israeli colonial project of preventing Palestinian births by way of biopolitical violence in making healthcare inaccessible and non-inclusive to Palestinian women is also psychological warfare. Shaloub-Kevorkian (2015) notes how pregnant Palestinian women’s anxieties about reaching checkpoints and giving birth in the oEJ enter their subconscious and manifest in nightmares. While awake, they are consumed by their fears of losing their babies, leaving their small children to give birth, facing Israeli authority, and getting arrested. As they lay down to sleep, it is no different. In Myanmar, women, steeped in their anger towards a patriarchal military rule, launched naked protests to disturb gender norms surrounding the respectability attached to womanhood and the sexual availability of female bodies to men (Mra and Hedström, 2024). Every day they are mobilized by their feelings of pain, anger, and hope as they resist a world that renders them inferior simply for being women. They are not interested in ironing out the beginnings and endings of the conflict they endure as most IR researchers are, Parashar (2013) notes. The urgency lies in where they take their bodies, how they carry themselves, and what they do to survive. In experiencing violence every day, bodies become maps of conflict and resistance, their psyche the compass.
Questions:
How can a perceived distinction between mind and body be dangerous in the context of experiencing war and gender in the ‘everyday’?
What are other ways in which women’s bodies are appropriated in colonial projects and feared in revolutions?
I have two big takeaways from this week’s readings. Firstly, I need to stop doing readings for this course in public spaces because I keep tearing up (they are great readings though!) Secondly, Parashar’s analysis of how the integration of embodied experiences into International Relations (IR) critiques the field’s abstraction of war, emphasizing the lived realities of those affected. She argues that IR overlooks these lived, bodily experiences. From these readings, I am beginning to understand how incorporating the experiences of “war bodies” into IR would challenge its abstract focus and provide a deeper understanding of conflict. War is a daily reality for many, not an exceptional event, and IR must account for the human experiences that shape it.
Parashar argues that war is not a disruption of daily life, but rather a “way of living and daily performance” (2013, 618), with some actors are there by choice, and others not. This in turn shapes identities and communities at both the local and global level. In the documentary, My Daughter, the Terrorist, Antonia, the mother of an LTTE fighter, asks, “How can you study war without understanding what it means to people?” (Antoinia in Parashar, 2013, 619). This highlights the gap in IR’s understanding of war’s daily realities; ‘war bodies,’ including refugees and civilians, embody international relations in ways that IR fails to recognize. For instance, refugees often prioritize basic survival over extraordinary events, yet these ‘banal moments’ are typically ignored by IR (Parashar, 2013, 618). I feel that this quote from Parashar captures her argument: “The beginnings of war are in the banal, in the everyday acquisition of tribal lands and forests, in daily encroachments on the property of the poor, in the brutality of the police and security forces, in a sudden suicide bomb attack that visits people’s lives as they go about their mundane daily chores” (2013, 620). This perspective challenges IR’s focus on state actors, drawing attention to the human costs of conflict.
The other readings support Parashar’s argument, and discuss how women and other people’s embodied experiences in conflict zones reveal the gendered dynamics of resistance. In Myanmar, women creatively resist military oppression by using gendered symbols like bras in protests, and even their own bodies. One protester remarked that as they have no weapons, their abilities lie in discomfort with the female body when used for protest, remarking that ““[w]e have no weapons to harm them [police and soldiers], but anything that worries or delays them is our weapon” (Frontier Myanmar, February 16, 2021 in Mra and Hedström, 2024, 769). Despite facing sexual violence, women’s leadership persists, challenging military and patriarchal norms. Similarly, Palestinian women navigate military checkpoints and biopolitical control over their reproductive rights, resisting through everyday acts of defiance. There is a complex relationship between their bodies and resistance, wherein their wombs are seen as ‘weapons’ in the ongoing fight against a colonial power, and a threat to the colonial state itself (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2015, 1190).
This reminded me of something I learned in an undergraduate course, where the professor mentioned that female suicide bombers in Palestine disguise explosives under the guise of pregnancy. Knowing that professor’s political views, I was skeptical of this being an epidemic or pattern as he indicated, rather than a few isolated incidents. When reflecting this week, I looked further into this issue and found an interesting article criticizing the perceived threat of female Muslim bodies in the post 9-11 period, specifically an article released by the US Department of Homeland Security in 2008 on the topic. The authors define this perceived threat of ‘mom-bombs’ or cross-dressing men hiding bombs under female clothing as a new orientalist orientation against both female and queer bodies. They argue that depictions of “the pregnant terrorist body as treacherous ‘containers paved the way for representations of the pregnant terrorist body as a national security threat” (Magnet and Mason, 2014, 199). This illustrates how gendered bodies in war-zones are seen both as social and literal weapons, leading to dehumanization and everyday mistreatment.
Questions:
What are the implications of viewing bodies as both symbols and weapons in resistance movements?
How can the integration of embodied experiences in IR transform our understanding of conflict, particularly in terms of humanitarian aid decisions and peace negotiations?
I want to begin by acknowledging that this is a more vulnerable post. My thoughts have been scattered over the past few days, and while this may not directly answer the questions or topics at hand, I hope at least one of my peers gains something from it.
This morning, I woke up to three notifications from Al Jazeera about Israel launching airstrikes on Lebanon. As I read through the headlines, I noticed a familiar and chilling pattern, where each update brought news of increasing casualties and injuries. The 3:45 am report mentioned 50 dead and 300 wounded. By 5:55 am, that number had escalated to 182 killed and 727 wounded. The final article reported that Israel’s airstrikes were no longer confined to Hezbollah territory in Southern Lebanon and Beirut neighbourhoods, but had spread to Eastern Lebanon as well.
Two days ago, I called my mother who currently lives in Lebanon with my father. I expressed my concern for her, asking her to stay safe and be vigilant due to the increasing risks of war. Her response to me was “Layla, it’s fine. I’m fine. They’re targeting Hezbollah, not us. Stop worrying so much.” Her nonchalant response hit me, made me upset, and I couldn’t shake it off until I read Swati Parashar’s work on war bodies. Her words “people live in wars, with wars, and war lives with them long after it ends,” struck me as they echoed what I had always known about my parents. War is not just something that happened around them; it is what made them who they are. I have just lived a privileged enough life, one that I owe entirely to my parents, which grants me the privilege to worry about them from this distance.
As I read more from Parashar and Shalhoub-Kevorkian, I began to recognize the complex relationship between violence, the human body and wars, demonstrating that war isn’t just fought with weapons and armies. That it’s fought through the lived experiences and bodies of civilians, particularly women, whose bodies can either be sites of violence and war, or sites of resistance. My parents’ familiarity with violence rooted in their experience during the Civil War, speaks to this. For them, the sound of missiles, the fear of hunger and death, and the disruption of daily life was routine, so much so that this disruption became an expectation. This violence has shaped them, but it does not define them. They don’t see themselves as victims of war, but as a mother and a father, Lebanese citizens, an engineer and accountant who love music, cooking, dancing, and their Lebanese culture.
What continues to deeply trouble me however is how the stories of people such as my parents – people who live through these wars, are parts of the wars- are often left untold or unexplored. Their lived experiences get overlooked, reduced to statistics and political strategies, as presented by Mra & Hedström. The media and politicians tend to focus on casualty counts, political gains, and losses, while neglecting the personal narratives that expose the human cost of conflict. This is harmful to women and children, whose bodies are often portrayed as passive victims, stripped of dignity and autonomy, as exemplified by the image of the Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, whose lifeless body was plastered across countless articles. In an interview with the Guardian, Alan Kurdi’s aunt stated, “don’t concentrate only on my family. Why are thousands of other Syrians in Turkey also so desperate? Why do they want to leave?” Her words highlight how the experiences of individuals are pushed aside in favor of broader geopolitical discussions, reinforcing narratives that overlook how war disproportionately affects women and children. This tragic image of Alan did capture global attention, but it also underscores how vulnerable groups, especially women, bear the brunt of this violence—not only as victims but also as agents whose stories and resistance are too often forgotten or ignored.
What would it mean to shift our understanding of war to encompass the lived experiences of those affected? How can we begin to acknowledge the psychological and physical toll that bodies endure in the pursuit of political objectives? At what point did we start to treat bodies as instruments of psychological warfare, and why do we allow these known abuses to continue unchecked? Why are women continuously affected by this violence, and what are the implications of viewing them solely as victims or agents in the context of gendered violence during conflict?
This quote from Parashar’s article also stuck with me: ‘We were better prepared for death than for life.’ reminding me how lucky I am and how affected others are.
My grandfather was Ukrainian. He was the youngest of a large family. Most of his siblings died in either Holodomor or in the army. My grandfather eventually left Ukraine – according to my dad, grandpa decided that “he was next if he didn’t get out of there,” and he lived in Germany and then eventually Canada. My father was born and raised in Canada and so was I. I do not speak Ukrainian, aside from a few phrases. I lived in Ukraine for six months in 2019-20. During this time I made friends and found family members from the one remaining branch of my family in Ukraine.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion into Ukraine, I had a number of family members and friends reach out to me to discuss the conflict. Often, they wanted to talk about the war from an abstracted geopolitical lens, though sometimes they asked me about my personal connections there.
I didn’t know how to respond to these questions and still don’t. I feel far enough removed from my Ukrainian heritage that the grief and anger does not feel as though it is fully mine, however I nonetheless have trouble having abstracted conversations about the conflict. Ultimately, I know that Ukraine must win the war because my family and friends are Ukrainian. That’s all.
In a similar way, I don’t know how to discuss the readings from this week. I don’t know how to abstract from personal stories to bring discussions to an academic setting.
I saw some of this reflected in the readings from this week. For example, when Parashar stated, “People who fight/suffer/live inside wars do not worry about how wars begin and end (causes and consequences), for either they know the answers or know where to look for answers.” (Parashar, 2013, 617). But I struggled with other portions of the readings. For example, in the next paragraph, Parashar says, “Those who enter into war also find ways to live with it and get out of it.” (Parashar, 2013, 617). What about my grandfather’s five siblings and his father who did not live with it and get out of it? What about the fact that, because of war, my grandfather’s children and grandchildren did not speak any of the first four languages he spoke, isolating him to speaking with his own family in his fifth language? Many do not live with it and get out of it. For those that do, nothing is the same.
Maybe I am missing the point. I know the point was to engage with war as something deeply personal and also mundane for many people. But I don’t know how to do that, even from within my own family. My grandfather very rarely, if ever spoke of his wartime experiences. Who am I to take those, or anyone else’s story, for that matter, to a setting in which it will be scrutinized in order to produce academic knowledge?
The mundane: A walk to a pizza shop with a sibling
On the night I arrived to Libya last year my cousin was recounting the stories of the girls we went to school with (who was married now and who with child). I was remembering the passing of a classmate’s brother. Her name was Salsabil. I do not remember her brother’s name. My cousin had forgotten how he passed. I was visiting after a ten year absence from this land and it remained in my memory.
He was murdered in broad daylight in 2014 on a walk to go get pizza with his sister. The story is marked in my mind as one of the many reasons why we had to leave Libya at that time. How precarious were our lives once catastrophe struck so close? Whenever I remember the story, I can see Salsabil running. The murderer was intending her next as his target. And I see her in my mind perhaps in her home, where I attended my first funeral on behalf of a friend, the Quran and melancholy heavy in our palms. Or in our gray and pink uniforms as she recounted to us in our eighth grade class, how she ran and found refuge in a neighbour’s home. That she pounded the door, and somehow between breaths of utter devastation she was only able to say she was being chased. The details are palpable, I find myself becoming quiet catapulted to a different time.
And as I reminded my cousin of this story… she laughs. In Arabic she responds:
“I had forgotten all of this to be honest. We’ve lived a lot of life since then. But I can tell that you’re still there.”
In retrospect. my cousin illuminated how security is produced and reproduced through the engagement with the political landscape regardless of its being a locus of insecurity. People’s lives continue and they live the ordinary lives despite the risk of its permeation.
As I parsed through this week’s readings, I thought of how war permeated my every day. The experience of war at home versus in public spaces was distinctly shaped by the architectures of security. It was unsafe for a girl to go outside. My every day routines had to be in the confines of four walls. Survival and safety resulted in the livelihood practice of baking, I managed risk measuring flour, sugar, and butter and rejoicing in having family members revel at my talents over tea when the lights would go out. Ordinary life necessitates a rhythm despite the singular moments of disruption and I found myself becoming more grateful to my cousin’s comment—that perhaps there is hope in the cranies of that rhythm—marriages, new borns, graduations and so much more. That looking to the future we still have reasons to rejoice.
I went to an all-girl catholic school in Mexico, and the congregation is present in many states of the country, including Michoacan. Michoacan is a state that is de-facto run by the several cartels that operate within its borders, and yet people find a way to continue living. In discussing how war is not necessarily a disruption of the everyday but rather it becomes a new everyday, I think about how the nuns in Michoacan need to constantly interact with cartel members. It can be as simple of an interaction of going to the house next door asking if they had some extra fruit they could buy, and the nuns having to walk through halls and rooms with men in balaclavas and guns out in the open. For me, this would definitely not be considered my everyday life but for the nuns, and for the people living in Michoacan it is. Yet, under IR standards, would these people living in Michoacan be considered sympathizers to the cartels? Would they be considered victims? Or how exactly would academia want to categorize the people living in these contexts?
The question that Parashar asks in regards to Antonia’s story, “how can you study war as causes and consequences, without understanding human experience and what war means to people” (619), I think is reflective of how academia has come to understood war. Parashar also touches on how International Relations (IR) as a field of study, has become way too concerned with numbers and figures in order to explain a conflict, and struggle to entertain the idea that there are people who have lived and survived wars that do not fit within the expectations of what IR and academia in general have come to understand of who are the survivors.
I think about the stories of women in Germany during the liberation and immediate post-WWII years, stories of rape and sexual assault perpetrated by soldiers from the Allied powers. The identities of perpetrator and victim were blurred, and even if they were to speak about what had happened to them, even if they were to be believed that they experienced a violation of their bodies, it did not matter because at the end of the day, they represented the enemy. Of course, there is also the gender-based violence of these acts, that goes beyond the aspects of war in the form of the entitlement to women’s bodies. War has always had a gender dimension that is not always acknowledged and makes it even more difficult to understand the lived experiences of people who have lived and continue living in such contexts.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian talks about the settler-colonial state and the violence it inflicts on Palestinian women. It made me reflect on the very definition of “war”. While yes, there is the most accepted definition of it (“a state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations” according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary), I think about my own experiences in Mexico, and how the State has waged war against women, from deciding to not investigate into the femicides (it is estimated that 10 women are killed every day, most often by a male partner) or into the thousands of women who have disappeared and who the government quite literally erased from the statistics (almost a year ago, there was a “revision” of the national registry of cases of missing women in which the official number went from 110,000 to just 12 thousand), or how the public health care system has systematically performed tubal ligations on indigenous women without their knowledge or consent.
Question:
Maybe I am approaching the questions I am supposed to come up with this week in the wrong way, because at the end of the day, I feel like I am asking the same questions the readings are trying to address but they leave me at the same time with questions of what exactly is war? Who are the survivors? How can academia, historically violent, can even come close to explaining and understanding the lived experiences of people who have lived through war?
This week’s readings have deepened my understanding of war studies by emphasizing the importance of everyday experiences in conflict zones, a perspective I had previously overlooked. Parashar highlights the disconnect between International Relations (IR) and the realities of war, as IR often focuses on state-centered analyses while neglecting the lived, emotional, and gendered experiences of individuals. This gap means that IR theory fails to capture the full reality of conflict. Parashar argues that a feminist perspective can bridge this gap by focusing on the personal dimensions of war, recognizing that women, children, and marginalized groups are active participants, not just passive victims. This human-centered approach fosters empathy and enriches our understanding of conflict, moving the field beyond purely theoretical analysis to a more compassionate view that integrates real-life experiences.
McQuaid’s work reinforces the idea that marginalized groups are not passive victims but active participants, highlighting the resilience and agency of individuals like Alex. Despite enduring multiple layers of violence—being orphaned, assaulted, discriminated against, and displaced—Alex navigates life with remarkable strength. His ability to build social networks, even in hostile environments like refugee camps, and his evolving identity as an LGBTQ+ refugee emphasize the importance of recognizing the agency of those often portrayed as mere victims in humanitarian narratives. This challenges the oversimplified “victim” framework frequently applied to sexual minorities in conflict zones, urging us to view them as active participants in their survival and advocacy. McQuaid’s work also reveals that violence extends beyond physical acts, affecting social, psychological, and institutional spheres. For marginalized individuals, violence is an ongoing reality, deeply embedded in everyday life, especially for those marginalized by ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. This expands our understanding of violence, prompting us to acknowledge its many forms, including structural violence, which are often overlooked.
Reading Mra and Hedstrom prompted me to reflect on how women in Myanmar utilized their bodies and gendered symbols, such as htamein (women’s undergarment) and sanitary products, as forms of resistance against the military regime. These symbols, often associated with shame or impurity, were creatively repurposed to challenge deep-rooted patriarchal norms, transforming cultural beliefs into tools for undermining authority. This defiance illustrates how women’s bodies, often sites of social and political control, can also symbolize empowerment. The protests also highlight the intersection of physical and digital activism, with women using online platforms to share images of their bruised bodies and campaigning with red lipstick and raised fists. This approach shows how modern movements can transcend borders and amplify local struggles on a global scale. Moreover, it reveals how women’s bodies are often entangled in issues of race, nationalism, and control. The military’s use of gendered violence reinforces both political oppression and ethnic hierarchies. Yet, these protests demonstrate that women’s bodies, rather than being passive sites of control, can serve as powerful symbols of resistance and survival.
Questions:
How can we reconcile the emotional and personal dimensions of war with the more abstract theories in IR and war studies to create a more holistic understanding of conflict?
What impact does cultural practices and symbols have on resistance efforts and how can they bring marginalized groups together?
Niromi’s story is one that made me stop and thinking about how there are tons of people in many parts of the world that currently live everyday lives where the state of war is completely normalized. It is something that makes me reflect on my privilege in residing in the Western world or Northern hemisphere, where peace has been present for virtually my entire life. I have friends who get scared of firecrackers, meanwhile people who find themselves in situations like Niromi’s where hearing bomb explosions or seeing dead bodies (Parashar, 2013, p. 618) was perceived as the norm.
One takeaway had which is a point I fully agreed with from Parashar’s article is that we need to study and theorize war differently. Rather than a top-down approach which focuses on the actions of states, institutions, and people in power while viewing commoners only as mere numbers, we should look at war from a bottom-up approach. Those that lived through war know best about how it has influenced them, and they are crucial for constructing an accurate war narrative (Parashar, 2013, p. 626).
The reading that caught most of my attention and shocked me to the core was Butalia’s ‘Community, State and Gender: On Women’s Agency during Partition’ (1993). It took me longer than usual to read through all the pages due to the graphic and explicit content. It also made me a bit emotional imagining what women and children went through during the Partition of India. Women and children not only went through an impeccable amount of trauma for years, if they were lucky enough to not be killed, they were likely abducted, (forcibly or non-forcibly) converted, and started new lives with men that already prayed on them. Many of them were then asked by their State and community to return back ‘home’, and understandably not all of them wanted to re-live trauma and re-start (Butalia, 1993, p. 20) once again after what they went through. All their experiences were difficult to read through as I could never truly understand what women and children who suffered with all these traumas went through. Those that did want to go back were often not allowed to by their own family or community too, mostly in the name of ‘purity’, ‘honour’, or ‘religion’. It disgusts me when I think about how women (not just during the Partition, but historically) were treated as property by men in their families, communities, and the state. Women in these cases were not treated like human, especially when it came to their autonomy. Many if not all their decisions regarding their bodies and lives were made by men, if not, strongly coerced by expectations and standards set by men. Women that made their own decision to jump in wells to preserve their ‘honour’ or ‘purity’ did not do so out of their own free will, it was a decision they made under the influence of living their entire lives under the standards, expectations, and teachings of their religion, family, community, and so on. Meanwhile, men had next to none of these same standards, and men that married women of other religions were definitely not shunned as much as women that did so.
The reading reminded me of an old website I found which was the first time I ever read articles on the Partition of India. It is a website that I think some people here would like to read it if they had not heard of it before. It is ‘https://in.1947partitionarchive.org/’, an archive that is expanding daily to include more stories about this event (men’s stories are included too). I thought it would be okay to share this as this fascinated me when I found it.
My questions that I formed while reading Butalia’s article were regarding a point of theirs in their writing. The author wrote about the need to know more about the women who took their own lives, or ‘offered’ themselves as sacrifice (p. 19). I know it is a very dark question to ask, but the moment I read that, my mind immediately asked ‘How could one even do that?’ and ‘How can people find out more about those women?’ due to the nature of what the author talks about. I feel like there is not much more one can do to know the story of someone who made the decision to take their own life seven decades ago.
I would like to first admit that I am mostly uncomfortable acknowledging the existence of the/my body as anything other than a little racecar driving my brain from room to room.
I have been thinking a lot this month about the distance that IR puts between the academy and the entire world and the condemnation of any proximity between academic “observers” of International Relations (proper noun) and international relations, relationships and relationality as inadequately academic. I think last week I said I felt like we had all been duped into thinking objectivity was ever really real and that the objectivity we are trained to revere is shaped by systemic bias and not really objective at all. This might have been a little dramatic, but it makes me wonder whether all this enforced distance is a legacy of cyclical academic culture or whether it serves a purpose I don’t want to or can’t see.
Reading Mra and Hedström and McQuaid makes me think, cynically, that some of the reason IR demands such distance is to maintain a semblance of plausible deniability, demanding to “be the innocent bystander” (Parashar 618). If IR does not have to be close to war, practitioners seldom have to consider whether war is a condition of everyday life or an interruption (only, as Parashar points out, how wars start and end). Parashar argues that the relevance of bodies to the discipline of IR is that “war bodies and the war dead there for construct the international in various ways” (623). The body in war is constructed as significant only as a symbol or as a numerical indicator of a war’s magnitude. In IR, the body in wartime is so different from the body in peacetime. We don’t think of wartime bodies as ever like, needing a Tums. The body is imagined only in its proximity to the conflict, helping uphold the idea that war is not an everyday occurrence but an interruption of mundanity.
In doing so, IR obscures the truths that academics want to find. I really believe that, for the most part, we as academics really do want to find truths. In our lives, if I want to know the truth about something happening in my family, I would not put distance between us and hope to observe from a distance. I would ask my favourite and most well-informed cousin, and then maybe a few others I could trust. Their experience in these relationships is what is true and all the different relationalities at play inform the truths we seek to find. Not to compare my family dynamic to international conflict, but the same could be said of conflict and war in IR. There are more truths about how war IS (not how it starts or ends) in Alex’s story than in the pictures on the news or the theories in the books. The effect of war on the body is not happening only in the “moments of overt physical violence that occur within and because of protracted political conflicts” (McQuaid 570) just as war is not just what is shown on BBC.
Anyway, this week left me with lots of questions. I asked my therapist today, somewhat comedically and in reference to this class: did you know that if you really take dedicated time to reflect on information and feelings, you build all these connections between different concepts and realities? And she said, “yeah, welcome!”
1. In the stories told within these articles, a theme of multiple truths emerges prominently (i.e. Alex’s stories about being both part of and apart from communities and the effects that this has). To what degree does academia/IR afford itself multiple truths and how can we account for multiple truths in our own work?
2. What is the business of IR in the everydayness of war? What importance does the mundanity of conflict impart?
While reading “The politics of birth and the intimacies of violence against Palestinian women in occupied East Jerusalem” by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, I couldn’t help but recall a disturbing comment made by a student I had met during my undergraduate degree. With no sense of remorse, he joked about encouraging settlers in Israel to have more babies in order to facilitate the “Palestinian push”–the displacement and erasure of Palestinians from their homeland. The birthing Native women stands in the way of this push, and as evidenced by the temporal, spatial, psychological, and physical violence inflicted upon Palestinian women, terrifies the colonial administration (Shelhoub-Kevorkian 1188).
Having many family members, close and distant, who have given birth or been pregnant in the past few years, I have seen how traumatizing birth, miscarriage, and health scares during pregnancy can be under the best of circumstances. I cannot fathom the grief, fear, and turbulence that comes from being unable to access family support, particularly in cultures where multiple generations of a family are expected to come together to support a pregnant person. Alex’s fear of going to the hospital due to his gender/sexual minority status (as written about in Katie McQuaid’s “Violent continuities: telling stories of one sexual minority life in the African Great Lakes region”) overlaps with a conundrum Palestinian women and their support systems face upon going to the hospital: will their need to access healthcare result in their arrest? (McQuaid 579). If their community does decide to accompany them to surveilled institutions, will their family and friends be imprisoned or discriminated against based upon sexuality or race?
Apart from disfigurement or lifelessness, upon completing the above readings, I think that “war bodies” also encompass bodies that are forced to act against their nature out of fear for being persecuted. Aida preventing herself from giving birth until she reaches Jerusalem is an example of this fight against the natural (Shelhoub-Kevorkian 1194), a war inside one’s own body where the scars and long-lasting traumas are more hidden. In love, Alex and Guillaume were attacked for a natural desire for sexual intimacy (McQuaid 580).
Thus, my question for this week is, in what other ways do “war bodies” emerge internally, as a necessity for protection of self and the ones we love?
A theme that stood out to me was how women can use their gendered roles as a means of resistance and protest. Mra and Henström’s (2024) describe the Myanmar Spring Revolution. The article describes how women reclaimed gender norms as a form of protest. Parashar (2013) states, “theoretical impulse has been to see women as victims and mourners in patriarchal wars; these women had stories that were about their own personal involvement in wars; stories that could be woven into narratives about how traditional gender roles did not keep women away from war and violence” (pg. 626). I thought back to this particular quote when reading Shalhoub-Kevorkia (2014) article about pregnant Palestinian women in occupied East Jerusalem. In the case of these women, their gendered roles as mothers and “biological reproducers” (pg. 1190) places them directly in the line of violence. Women in the article face violence just trying to get the care they need. Women describe the desire for their children to be born in certain hospitals based on their location. These women cross checkpoints and put themselves at risk so their children can be born in a location that would grant them access to a Jerusalemite ID card. These women may not be directly involved in armed conflict or resistance movements, but their actions as pregnant women navigating around state control to me represents a form of resistance. These women are not passive actors, they are actively resisting the imposed control on their bodies and movement to grant their children as much freedom and opportunity as they can.
Another thought I had while reading Parashar (2013) article was connected to the section about the politics of mourning. Back in April World Central Kitchen workers were killed in Gaza. These aid workers were all over the news, I identified with pictures accompanied by quotes given to by their friends and family. The news sparked international attention and backlash towards Israel and led to the dismissal of two Israeli officers. Israel’s Prime Minister is quoted in an article describing the event as “tragic”. I am struggling to wrap up this chain of thought but maybe my question after this week’s readings is, how have the politics of morning played out in the Israeli-Gaza conflict? How have the politics of mourning shaped how we understand past and ongoing conflicts?