I am reminded of Suheir Hammad in ‘First Writing Since’—”affirm life, affirm life.” Across the readings this week, I was again prompted, as in previous weeks, to pay attention to the mundane and the political aspects of our everyday relationships. In mainstream discourse surrounding war and peace, it has become more intuitive to think of macro-level analyses as an expansion of knowledge—widening the scope of the inter- and intra-personal to analyse how groups, states, and institutions interact and collaborate to create and provide ‘security’. Because of these norms, it has become radical to consider how interpersonal sites of care and love influence larger social systems and broaden perceptions of war and resilience. With the literature in WPS focusing on intergroup violence and on the pains and gaping wounds of those affected, there is a sense of disservice to the humanity of victims/survivors of gender-based violence. For it is always helpful to be reminded by the fact that “in the midst and wake of violence, people also fall in love (Roxani & Schulz, 2022, p. 2).”
Berry (2022) notes that the notion of resilience needs to be restructured from neoliberal narratives that place the burden of social change to individuals rather than placing accountability on systems of oppression. Their article illustrated the idea that resilience is inherently relational because none of us live in isolation. The everyday actions we do for each other matter because they build a culture of relationality that transcends the capitalist value of individualism. Hudson (2021) explains Ubuntu feminism as involving identity, specifically accepting our dependence on others to survive. Barry (2022) echoes this sentiment by saying that “survival… [is] a collective project (p. 4).” A friend from a youth organization that I’m a part of recently put out a mutual aid post for urgent dental care and in two days his community raised enough money to get him the surgery he needed. It was a testament to how resilience and resistance are built around love. Community care is a way to resist systems that thrive when we are divided.
The act of love has been framed as a choice under colonialism. It is instead a reflex built into the human experience, and it is something that we owe to each other. In Roxani & Schulz (2022) victims/survivors of war remember their experiences of conflict and love certain aspects of it, for example of feeling nostalgic about the comradery and sense of belonging found in guerilla groups, or missing the way of life during wartime. Love is found everywhere across the lifespan of conflict. Love, beyond for each other and community, is felt for physical places and memories, grounding peoples’ continuous processes of healing. As bell hooks wrote, “It is essential to our struggle for self-determination that we speak of love. For love is the necessary foundation enabling us to survive the wars, the hardships, the sickness, and the dying with our spirits intact. It is love that allows us to survive whole.”
Questions:
1. “When things go badly, they are well documented… But when they go well, there’s silence (Roxani & Schulz, 2022, p. 16)” How do we write about love and care, or when things go right, without minimalizing the violence that surrounds it? How do we fill that silence without participating in other versions of silencing?
2. When care work becomes a form of institutionalised labour that’s compensated, can it undermine the experience of love?
I was really drawn to Marie Berry’s article on “Radicalizing resilience: mothering, solidarity, and interdependence among women survivors of war” because of its focus on what it means to be resilient. As I’ve mentioned in class before, I currently work on an podcast called Don’t Call Me Resilient that aims to respond to breaking news events through an anti-racist lens. The name of the podcast itself is a commentary on how being called resilient places the burden of adaptation to or acceptance of mistreatment on the individuals affected instead of the institutions driving insecurity in the first place. So as you might imagine, I was curious to learn about how my understanding of resilience might be challenged.
Berry of course acknowledges the critique upon which the title of the podcast was formed, but attempts to reframe resilience by offering arguments on the interdependent and relational nature of resilience and networks of care. And while I appreciate Berry’s attempt to move away from the “critique that relegates resilience to an individualized process of carrying on despite a violence and unjust status quo,” and actually find some of her arguments on solidarity and interdependency quite compelling, some of her perspectives left me with some discomfort and questions. In particular, I felt that a discussion on how oppressive infrastructures are designed to prevent networks of care from forming was missing. The care that comes from solidarity and interdependence feels grounded in the assumption that finding networks or a person to relate with is an easy or natural process. As we know, however, violence and sexual violence can be an extremely isolating event. Where was the acknowledgement about how systems of violence can isolate victims/survivors, turn victims/survivors against each other, and keep them apart?
In a later section on Solidarity, Berry discusses how she has been struck by the way many women recalled experiencing a shift in their own resilience after learning of others’ experiences they perceived to be more painful or extreme. My immediate reaction to reading this was: “but can’t this invalidate the painful and unfair traumas of their own experiences?.” Berry briefly mentions here that she has written about the problems related to the hierarchies of victimhood elsewhere, but doesn’t provide any justification for leaving it out of this article and doesn’t elaborate on the potential harms of what feels a little bit like a competition for most oppressed status.
Without the necessary context on these two sections, Berry’s attempt to radicalize understandings of resiliency felt oversimplified and incomplete. I did come away from the article with an expanded understanding of how the process of being resilient is supported and made easier through relationships and networks of care, but I still feel hesitant to employ labels of resiliency in a purely positive way.
Question:
What does policy-making that prioritizes love and care look like? How does it extend beyond developing spaces for connection and sharing?
The African feminist understanding of feminism in the context of conflict and war specifically, the idea of women cooperating with men without reversing gender roles surprised me. It highlighted the deep influence of patriarchal roots, where women are often expected to bear the burdens of care and love, while men are not held to the same standard. This perspective made me rethink the concept of collective action and the need to unlearn individualistic mindsets when discussing unity and mutual support.
The author connects global issues of Ubuntu feminism with human security, illustrating how care is often perceived as a responsibility assigned to women, localized within the family or home. This made me reflect on the everyday expectations placed on women to sacrifice their own dreams or goals in the name of care, as even slight deviations can be deemed unacceptable by society. Moreover, the normalization of violence, where the perpetrator and victim reconcile without justice being fully served, is something I have observed in many cases, where victims are often discouraged from seeking justice in favor of reaching a memorandum of understanding and the perpetrator is set free (sometimes family supports the perpetretor too stating their idea of innocence and blaming situations or victims).
In a similar vein, the concept of ethical care in conflict zones, deeply rooted in everyday experiences of insecurity, highlights the complexity of human and societal vulnerabilities. Krystalli’s work, which emphasizes taking love and care seriously, is a wake-up call to reconsider human relationships, even in contexts of severe violence and conflict. The author discusses the importance of healing and maintaining connections “in the wake” of conflict, urging us to rethink our definitions of care and love. The clear distinction of what should not be considered love or care resonated with my own understanding of these terms, particularly within the broader social context and web of relationships. This perspective led me to appreciate the resilience and relational connections of millions of women who seek support in counseling centers or shelters, not as symbols of victimhood, but as individuals in need of care.
Maja’s story deeply moved me, especially the need for supportive constants whether in the form of siblings, parents, friends, or other survivors who demonstrate unwavering dedication during challenging times. These “unsung s/heroes” are the true champions of peace. The resilience required to live with the trauma of brutal violence can only be achieved when care becomes the foundation for peace. This insight prompted me to reconsider existing resilience frameworks for post-war peacebuilding.
After reading all this, I have the following questions:
Given that care and love are subjective and drawn from individual experiences, what could be a powerful tool to integrate care and love into policymaking in conflict zones?
What is “care resilience,” and how can it be implemented to reinforce humanity in conflict and war zones?
Two points that were a common thread among the readings this week (I read Amya Agarwal’s chapter, Civilian and Caring Masculinities and the Questions of Justice in Kashmir as my third reading) were discussions of agency as well as the rejection of hyper-individualism.
To me, opening up the possibility for love and care as well as acknowledging the importance of relationality in situations where I have felt victimized has returned my own sense of agency. I think that quite often, narratives about victims or survivors do not leave space for discussions of agency within those situations and afterwards. I understand this, given that many conversations about the agency of victims can lead towards victim-blaming.
However, I think the readings opened space for discussion of agency without falling into the trap of victim-blaming. That is difficult to do because it involves navigating complexity and commitment to questioning the essentialization of certain groups, qualities, norms, or experiences. As Krystalli and Schulz said, “acknowledging the fact that moments of agency in spaces that, simultaneously, are permeated by violence requires holding multiple complex truths in one embrace” (17). Likewise, Agarwal discusses the multiple, overlapping manifestations of agency and vulnerability and the need to move beyond a dichotomy when discussing these issues (334).
I also appreciated the way the readings called into question the hyper-individualism that is a hidden assumption in many discussions of conflict, violence, and harm as well as peace, love, and care. Krystalli and Schulz explicitly question individualistic and neoliberal approaches and how these obscure relationalities, vulnerabilities, and dependencies. Hudson offers Ubuntu and Ubuntu feminism as an alternate lens through which to see peace-making as a communal responsibility and an exercise in solidarity.
Despite the feeling of “yes, this makes sense,” throughout much of the readings, I struggled to write this post. I found it a lot more difficult to read other people trying to grapple with holding space for multiple, complex truths than it is to do it myself. I still have a lot of questions.
I wonder what love and care really mean. Krystalli and Schulz explore possible definitions, but leave those definitions open to the interpretation of their interviewees. Still, I wonder what love and care mean to me. Krystalli and Schulz and Agarwal both cite bell hooks, and I have her books, Communion: the Female Search for Love and All About Love: New Visions at home, so I turned there. hooks defines love as both intention and action, as a choice, as “the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth,” and as something that cannot coexist with abuse. She describes care as a dimension of love (hooks, All About Love: New Visions, 4-8). I still wonder what that means in situations where conflict, harm, care, and love are all existing side-by-side. Maybe there is room for love and care as repair?
There’s so much more I wanted to mention that I won’t have the space for in this post. I wonder about essentialized narratives and who is harmed and helped by them. I wonder who dichotomies serve and who is served by their problematization. And for the millionth time in this course, I wonder what is known and by whom.
Questions:
1. What is love and care? Who gets to decide its parameters? When is a definition helpful and when is it harmful?
2. What does agency mean in the context of conflict and/or peace? Who has it? Who does not? What are the implications of narratives of having/not having agency?
3. How do individualistic and neoliberal approaches obscure relationalities, vulnerabilities, and dependencies?
4. Who is served by essentialized narratives of civilian/militarized masculinities? Who is harmed? And what are the implications of problematizing these essentialized narratives?
5. What is known? By whom?
I have to be honest; I mistakenly came into the readings this week hoping for a breather, a nice hopeful discussion of how love and care are entirely positive and transformative forces in conflict zones. Don’t get me wrong, there were certainly many examples of how love and care are integral to peace processes, a way to empower individuals and communities, and help heal survivors of trauma and war-related violence. I found the role of care in trust-building and peaceful transitions particularly interesting (Vaittinena et. al., 2019). However, in my optimism I forgot about a key reality; love is not an easy thing, and care is not some pure force independent of gendered violence or unequal burdens. I think that Krystalli and Schulz’s work capture this well in saying that “practices of love and care sit alongside violence and its echoes” (2022, p.3); by neglecting the political importance of love and care we deprive ourselves and our analyses of research and practical possibilities in our understanding of conflict. Upon reflection, I don’t think I was “taking love and care seriously” coming into this week.
Many of the readings highlighted this complex and nuanced relationship between love, violence, and care through key examples, all of which I found incredibly impactful. There was the story of the young girl who was brutally injured by a boy who was forced to hurt her, who was then instructed to treat her wounds as they cried together (Krystalli and Schulz, 2022, p.16). Berry also discusses the role of motherhood and radical maternal love as an aspect of resiliency, Nasira’s story emphasizing how targeting women in Palestine is “a way of threatening Palestine itself” (Berry, 2022, p.11). However, I was reminded of our previous reading and discussion on the politicization of Palestinian bodies during childbirth. This politicization is both an unfair burden and avenue for resistance as these women face violence and healthcare deprivation at military checkpoints (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2015). All of these examples illustrate the words of Nina, a former FARC combatant; “…there is love everywhere you look” (Krystalli and Schulz, 2022, p.17). This love and care can offer agency, it can offer roads to peace, but it doesn’t always exist as an antithesis to or cure for violence, but alongside it.
To help wrap up my thoughts, Hudson gives the example of a rebel boy in Sierra Leone who demanded a chicken at gunpoint, and a woman in the house offered him a biscuit and water, saying “He’s still somebody’s child” (Hudson, 2021, p.36). This story in particular reminded me of the Hozier song, Swan Upon Leda, which uses the ancient Greek myth of Leda and the Swan to discuss oppression against women, linking interpersonal violence to broader themes of colonial violence and resistance. One verse reminds me of these complex themes of love and violence, in a woman delivering presumably illegal medical care across a military checkpoint, “A graceful turner of heads; Weaves through the checkpoints like a needle and thread; Someone’s frightened boy waves her on; She offers a mother’s smile and soon she’s gone.”
I’m left with a couple of big questions on love, resistance, and what this means for peace outcomes:
How does perceiving love, care, and resilience as purely positive forces limit our understanding of both the role and potential of these forces in peace and security?
In situations where love and care are intertwined with violence, can these practices still be considered forms of resistance? How might such acts of care challenge or complicate conventional definitions of resistance in conflict zones?
As I’ve grown, I’ve tried to be more intentional with my words, understanding the weight they can carry for different people in certain situations. Through this class and my time in Vancouver, I’ve come to see that concepts like love and care carry profound meanings across different communities, shaping both individual experiences and collective values. Reflecting on this, I wonder how love and care can effectively work within contexts of violence and harm and how communities can use their varied meanings to create frameworks for resilience and recovery.
The framework of love and care as active, intentional forces demonstrates the work and labour that goes into these actions. Krystalli and Schulz emphasize that love and care are not passive states but conscious choices that manifest in behaviours, actions and priorities. In the context of violence and harm, these are so important when addressing trauma and destruction. Love and care are deliberate commitments to support others, and they require persistent effort and empathy.
I was particularly interested in Krystalli and Schulz’s concept of love and care as political acts and forms of resistance that enable communities to rebuild. Growing up, my parents and grandparents often mentioned the Lebanese lore of Beirut being destroyed and rebuilt seven times, associating it with the Phoenix, which is a symbol of rebirth in Lebanese-Phoenician history. The Phoenix is a firebird that rises from its ashes every five hundred years, embodying resilience and renewal. I see the Lebanese community as a phoenix, a community that can be and has been reborn through countless acts of care and solidarity. When communities welcome care into their lives as a deliberate, political choice, they reject narratives of division and misunderstanding perpetuated by systems of harm affecting welfare and livelihood.
Reflecting on these ideas, I recognize that community care is fundamentally rooted in the feeling of being understood and the capacity to grieve and heal together. This connection enables individuals within communities to support one another through shared suffering and resilience. Networks of care are essential for fostering resilience and solidarity; they create spaces where individuals can express their grief, share hope, and build strength together through love and care for each other.
So I ask:
• How can love and care, in all their varied interpretations, contribute to an effective framework for addressing violence and harm?
• What does it mean for a community when some individuals choose not to commit to love and care?
This week’s readings prompted me to think deeply about the roles of love and care in peacebuilding. I’ve always thought that creating lasting peace in conflict-affected communities is primarily about formal interventions, such as negotiations or economic aid. However, the authors suggest that genuine, transformative peace often emerges from acts of love and care in the everyday lives of those affected by violence.
Krystalli et al. describe how survivors in Uganda and Colombia turn to each other for support, creating networks to share resources and provide emotional comfort. The article challenges conventional views of love and care, presenting them not as passive traits linked to heteronormative ideals but as active practices in peacebuilding. It highlights that practice of love and care coexists with violence, and examining this relationship reveals what is usually left out in discussions on peacebuilding, negotiations, and conflict resolution in war context. Love and care are rarely included in these discussions because they are often seen as too personal. Yet, the article shows that integrating care into conflict resolution is essential; in these contexts, care is not just a survival mechanism but a powerful means of community rebuilding. Survivors’ groups become spaces for people to share stories and lean on each other, addressing immediate needs while fostering resilience and solidarity. This insight makes me realize how much we underestimate the importance of informal support systems in healing from trauma. The idea of love and care as core elements in peacebuilding also brings me to a deeper understanding of politics itself. The statement that “politics is a conversation about what it means to be a human being within the realm of social action” deeply moved me, as it reminds me to see love and care not as private emotions but as political practices that shape human connections and create pathways to peace.
Hudson’s discussion of African philosophy of Ubuntu and collective responsibility also expanded my view on peacebuilding. Ubuntu reframes peace as something inherently collective—a responsibility shared by everyone in a community. Peacebuilding approaches that I’m familiar with focused on rights and formal structures, reflecting much of what I encountered in my previous work. Ubuntu, however, reorients this by emphasizing that true peace comes when each person’s well-being is seen as part of the whole. This perspective suggests the incorporation of empathy and communal responsibility when generating policies and interventions. Rather than relying solely on governments or NGOs, peacebuilding could be seen as a community-wide effort, where everyone has a role in maintaining harmony and supporting each other.
Agarwal’s account of Imran and the concept of “caring masculinities” is eye-opening. It shows that there are ways of embodying masculinity in conflict zones that reject violence and focus on protection and care. Imran’s approach offers an alternative to the militarized masculinity often glorified in these settings, where strength is equated with violence. His courage lies in advocating for human rights and providing support for those affected by violence, challenging stereotypes that equate masculinity with dominance. This perspective is inspiring, as it shows that peacebuilding isn’t just about addressing external violence; it also involves transforming internal, social dynamics.
Question:
How could peacebuilding that emphasizes love, care, and community responsibility alter existing power structures in violence-affected societies?
I really enjoyed reading about Ubuntu feminism and how it can not only be used as a philosophy to end and prevent conflict but also used in everyday life. I want to believe that for the past several years I have been actively trying to slowly improve my ability to empathize with individuals around me, especially those I deeply care about, by being more capable of relating to others. One of the important aspects of Ubuntu feminism mentioned in Hudson’s article was about the ‘freedom to relate’ and how shared security can be found by looking at and understanding commonalities across genders instead of only looking at identical characteristics within a particular group (Hudson, 2021, p. 36). Being able to relate and reach out to others, as briefly mentioned in the article, is something I value a lot, and I admire individuals that can do this very well. Even though the article mostly covered this concept as it relates to war and conflict, I think it is applicable for everyone in daily life, as being able to relate to people is something I consider an incredibly valuable skill when it comes to community and friendship building. I found Hudson’s application of this aspect of Ubuntu feminism on a scale that is not just on a local or individual level to be very helpful, as even though I considered this to be incredibly important on an individual level, I had not previously encountered how this ontological approach could be done in the realm of global security politics. I do agree with the author that ‘care’ is a global political issue. I, however, did not realize how states ‘care for’ their citizens has a direct impact on global security (Hudson, 2021, p. 37). One of the main reasons why I began this program was because I believed that states should exist to best ‘care for’ their citizens and I wanted to learn how to best do that, and this article has made me realize that I should adjust how I personally approach this topic in policy as I continue to learn during this program.
Similarly, Krystalli’s and Schulz’s article further challenged my pre-existing ideas of love and care and how they could be applied to conflict and global or international politics. Much of my prior ideas and constructions of war and conflict were rather black and white, and ‘love and care’ had virtually no place in them. This article challenged me to re-visit these prior notions I had about these topics and made me realize that nothing in the world is ever truly black and white. For example, I did not quite understand what “relations of dependency care can be cruel as much as loving” (Krystalli & Schulz, 2022, p. 5) really meant during my first reading of the article. After another reading and a more thorough reflection on this feminist perspective, I understood it better and it taught me that I should definitely stop trying to define everything as strictly black and white when nothing truly is. This was one of those few moments where a single sentence really held a ton of symbolic meaning to me while reading through an entire article. A lot of points and examples in this article actually reminded me of some of our readings during week 3 in this course, particularly when we read about the troubling experiences of some women’s experiences during partition.
My question is based off Luciana’s reflections on page 19 from Krystalli’s and Schulz ’s (2022) article, and that is: Why is inquiring about love and care (especially in war and conflict) so gendered in research and journalism? Men should be encouraged more to talk about their feelings and emotions too (and women should understandably be asked about other everyday stuff like men are, emotions are applicable to every person regardless of gender identity).
I felt quite intrigued by this week’s readings. However because this method of framing is new to me (although warmly embraced), perhaps my language might not make sense. But a couple of days ago, while discussing our assigned artist, I looked at Elena with light in my eyes and perhaps a lightbulb at the top of my head as I elatedly exclaimed “ITS LIKE GARDENING!!!!”
When we meet, when we gather, we are constructing a social site. And imbued in our gathering is a politics. The social fabric is then a territoire upon which we toil and draw from it resilience and most importantly sustenance. The same is the case in gardening, our interactions with it might change in relation to its needs, and yet the effort is sustained in the hope of a new budding blossom finding its way to reach the light again.
I know this sounds rather positive but it does come with politically philosophical questions that were brought up in the readings like: Who does the care? or How much of the care am I accountable for?
The land upon which we toil, is a colonial body. We know this as the Earth has inherited the bodies that have brought us here. However, in transcending the grief inherited. I was called to widen my frame of life and love. And thus In parallel to Nasira’s story in Berry (2022), I thought of the resilience of the Palestinian olive wood tree. I was reading about Basma, an artisan in Bethlehem, who described planting the trees as marked by an intention “to remain long after they are gone, letting the people who come after them know that their hands also laid seeds into the ground, pruned the branches, and nourished the soil beneath it.” The intentionality behind such actions transcends immediate utility, positioning current acts of praxis as enduring markers of a legacy that asserts the continuity of collective labor and care. Such gestures I have found to be laden with symbolic permanence, conveying that future generations are witnesses to an embodied history—a testament that hands once engaged in sowing, tending, and cultivating the living landscape. Such acts inscribe resilience and communal memory into the physical environment, establishing an enduring narrative of interconnected stewardship that persists beyond individual lifetimes. And what must be realized in this process, is that this is the method that sustains life.
And so I wanted to end with the question:
What do you do today out of love and rooted in care for a future generation?
I think I need to read Krystalli and Shulz’s piece again. In terms of the core argument– take love and care seriously– I am sold (it was an easy sale). I loved the quote that returned attention to how, “Yet, in the midst and wake of violence, people also fall in love, forge social and intimate relationships, and extend different forms of care to one another.” This brought me back to our earlier conversations on the everyday. The authors’ critique of overemphasis on limiting the “field of vision to death and suffering”, together with the reference to Eve Tuck’s work on damage-centred research, was a bit of a call out, because I love talking about death and suffering. I think it’s possible I’ve gone a bit overboard with loving talking about death and suffering, because although I’ve spent comparatively a lot of time in my short little career talking about grief and trauma-informed care, I’ve never really parsed out the “care” part, and I don’t think I’ve spent even a fraction of the time talking about love.
At the same time, several pieces came up in this article came up which I will need to spend more time thinking about, which does stress to me the benefits of not doing the readings at the last minute, but alas, here we are in early November. The Shulz & Krystalli piece was a bit of a pandora’s box to me, because once they made the sale about taking love and care seriously, the specifics of navigating the multiple truths of the coexistence of love and violence became very messy to me. I love the concept of remaking worlds, but how do we go about doing the remaking when the remaking is clumsy, and we are clumsy? How much does intention matter- is it enough to do all things with love (and care)? On the one hand, the authors cite an interlocutor in Uganda who describes how “you can only ever support victims of war when you have them in your heart”, and yet, we see the example of the bureaucrats in Columbia describing how they did work with heart and love, which felt uncomfortable to read about it. So it seems fair to say that while support workers might believe they are acting with love, but inadvertently be making harmful choices, which the authors do recognize from what I understood. I think the easy out here is to go with social sciences answer that love is a necessary but not sufficient condition for meaningful victim/survivor support work, but I just feel like it’s more complicated than that, although I can’t quite articulate why.
I am very tempted to return to the concept of listening/hearing across harm, which is my latest favourite topic to think about, but for the sake of not being a broken record I won’t. Instead I want to reference a concept from Mia Mingus that she uses in her disability advocacy work, called access intimacy. For anyone who hasn’t come across it, access intimacy is “the […] hard to describe feeling when someone else ‘gets’ your access needs”. In other words, it’s a feeling of being understood and seen, and where a person’s needs are being met. Mia Mingus describes it as a feeling of “closeness I would feel with people who my disabled body felt a little bit safer and at ease with.” (Mingus, 2011). It’s not necessarily a huge sweeping action– “sometimes [access intimacy] is someone just sitting and holding your hand while you both stare back at an inaccessible world”.
I love this concept because I think it makes engaging with disability advocacy approachable and straightforward, especially in an area where people may not feel like they “know where to start”. It also expresses the solidarity, empathy, and “hearing across harm” that was coming up in the readings this week. And yet, we also need to know how to manage multiple and contradicting experiences– what happens if one person thinks they were acting out of love, care, or access intimacy, but that was not the experience of the person on the receiving end? Again, this returns to the issue of harm and love coexisting, and how much intention matters. I myself am feeling quite clumsy in my analysis this week so perhaps this is actually the perfect place for me to start.
My questions are:
With love and care, how much does intention matter? How do we actually navigate this on the day to day, and how do we make room for experiences of harm within love and care?
Is love inherently political?
Where does care happen? What does it mean for us when we move beyond state centric perceptions of care, and where do we actually need the state to conceptualize care?
What would happen if a “different kind of war story” was represented in the media? How can we tell better war stories? What even is a war story? (spiraling)
What would the world look like if we valued feminine traits just as if not more than masculine traits?
This is what I have been exploring most in my thoughts throughout the weeks in this class. For me, the readings this week spoke to the feminist future that has come up often in our discussions. A future that centers love and care.
I found it interesting the readings did not touch on paid care work. I know they were speaking mostly about everyday relational care within communities but paid care work is also an important pillar in communities. Women are disproportionally employed in care work fields (nurses, childcare, retirement homes, social workers, etc). Even though care work is essential to society, this type of work is notoriously underpaid and underappreciated. In a capitalist neoliberal society, those who devote their careers and lives to caring for others are not appreciated because their work does not directly contribute to the GDP. We have created a system that values those focused on individual capital gains. Think of how the economy would be different if it was organized around love and care. How would that change policy?
After reading these articles I was thinking about all the problems Canada is facing because care is not centered. Our crumbling healthcare system, the opioid crisis, a shortage of teachers, and daycare workers, etc. Would this be different if love and care were the centre of policymaking? If politicians prioritized care for individuals over the growth of the economy or corporations? Maybe this is how we have to tackle these issues, with a centred policy framework.
Over the summer I worked for a company called Minivillage. They are a community-building organization whose goal is to foster meaningful community connections specifically in apartment buildings. One of their main motivations is to increase community and individual resiliency. They believe connected communities are more resilient. I thought of this when reading Berry (2022). Resilience is not individual but relational. I saw this firsthand this summer when I interviewed residents in buildings Minivillage had partnered with. The buildings I engaged with were all affordable housing with many residents having lived through trauma and other tough situations. They all echoed the same sentiment, it is their community that has helped them the most. The strong community these buildings fostered helped support their recovery, and it went both ways. Residents valued being able to support other people as well. By focusing on strengthening communities rather than supporting individuals, communities become more resilient which in turn helps individuals become more resilient.
I asked many questions throughout this post but I guess my main questions are
How can we center care in policymaking? What would a future look like if love and care shaped policy? How would the world be different if policy focused on strengthening communities rather than supporting individuals?
This week’s readings merged ideas from previous weeks poignantly: the importance of interconnectedness, political reflexivity, genuine interest in others’ wellbeing, and love in getting to know one another and creating community linked the articles. Centering relational resilience, Ubuntu feminism, and an ethics of care, my mind can’t help but make the connection to how our own class has acted in alignment with the readings. The hospitality of sharing a warm coffee together and being invited to participate in sacred cultural traditions, the comfort we give and receive from one another when we tear up, and the solidarity that we extend to each other in affirming difficult experiences we share with vulnerability all contribute to the environment in our classroom. The sense of community we’ve cultivated is something that I think many of us can feel, embodied. Feelings of safety, support, shared grief, and shared hope. “The love that Maria narrated transcended romance, or the love for a single person or community, to encompass a sense of place, a way of living, and a way of relating to other sentient beings” (Krystalli & Schulz, 2022, pg.18). I’m already missing our group seminar discussions and the semester’s not even over yet!
Of course, the readings also described the many multi-faceted layers of love and care. In the Krystalli and Schulz article, the complexity of someone being both a source of care and harm in conflict settings was very interesting to read about–it makes me think back to our week on militarisation and the string of difficult decisions that human beings have to make in the systems that govern us. The army as a potential place of economic freedom for the solider, but also for possible mental and physical anguish, a mix of pride and shame. On the flip side of that is the love and camaraderie that former members of combatant groups could feel for one another, or their environment, even in the threat of great danger: “Maria told me she missed living in the jungle. ‘Not the war, not the weapon. The jungle” (pg. 17).
The Berry radicalising resilience reading asks us, “How much stronger would our peacebuilding processes be if humanitarian actors and peacebuilding practitioners structured their gender programming around forging interdependence and community well-being rather than individual success?” (Berry, 2022, pg.12). For those of us in the public policy program, I wonder how we might be able to integrate care webs and community well-being into different fields of policy (ex. security, GBV prevention, sustainability, development) that have various levels of open-mindedness towards non-individualistic/hegemonic solutions to institutional problems? How do we redefine what is deemed “professional” to include genuine care and interest in wellbeing as a priority in the workplace, rather than a purely capitalist-oriented environment where companies exchange support for improved worker output?
I mentioned in an earlier post that over the summer I had the opportunity of working with Erin (and Liliane :D) over the summer on their research on women with disabilities in post-conflict northern Uganda and the peacebuilding process. Part of what I was helping with was in co-writing a chapter on the use of body-maps as a research method: body-maps are life-size drawings of one’s body done with the support of whoever is participating in the activity. Part of what Erin, Liliane and the whole team in Uganda were trying to achieve, beyond the research/academic factor of trying to understand the lived experiences of the women in northern Uganda, was how can the researcher practice love and care when talking about very sensitive and difficult topics. Within the larger conversation of war and peace, and beyond the use of body-maps (which as an arts-based research method has the possibility to allow greater agency to the people participating as well as allowing them to share what sometimes cannot be told in simple words), the concept of love, care, and reciprocity were at the forefront of every interaction between the research team and the women in Gulu, Uganda.
The article by Marie Berry really struck as tying a lot of things we have been discussing in the past few weeks, like women and their experience of war, their resistance and resilience after war and what do we understand as peace/war and the way relationships can be formed in the aftermath of violence. I think this is the first time in the class that after the readings that even though I still kind of think we’d be better off if a meteor hit Earth, seeing and reading the stories of love, care and resilience show to me that the way things are do not have to be that way. It is kind of inspiring.
I think I’m struggling to put my thoughts into words, but one thing that I kept thinking about is a book I read two-ish months ago; it is called “The Briar Club” by Kate Quinn. There is obviously a lot more to it than what how I am relating it to this week’s topics (it is historical fiction after all, and so of course there is a little bit of drama to go with it) but a big part of the theme of the book is the creation of community and kinship. The story revolves around the lives of seven women living together in a boarding house in Washington D.C. during the height of the McCarthyism. But what truly makes the book is that they all have very different lived experiences of the war, they are living the Red Scare in many different ways because of said lived experiences but every single Thursday, they come together and have a meal and enjoy the company of each other. They (for the most part) grow to love and care about each other during a time where neighbors were against neighbors and when there was a sense of mistrust. Like I said, my thoughts are all over the place but hopefully you can all see the connections I made between the readings and this book.
Question:
1. Love and care in the context of WPS, is seen as a form of resilience and resistance because of the way academia has framed war and the peace building process. How can we move beyond that in order for love and care to be considered as a “given” action to take during difficult and violent times?
Years ago, a professor of mine brought in Dr. Sophie Richardson, who was at that point the China Director at Human Rights Watch, to talk to us about advocacy. “Advocacy,” she said, “is just asking people to do something good.” Because we were all anxious fourth-year social sciences undergraduate students, most of our questions of her revolved around How To Get Jobs. I took careful anxious notes on How To Get A Job and then there was a global pandemic so whatever. But one thing she said, that I did not write down, stuck with me. She talked about interviewing a candidate for an internship who professed that they had no experience working in human rights. Then, Dr. Richardson asked them about a gap in their resume, and they said they had taken two years away from work and school to care for their grandmother in Mexico who had suffered a stroke, to which Dr. Richardson said, “that is human rights work.” Her point was (and this, I did write down) that what she looked for in job candidates is that at some point, they had gone out and done something to try to make somebody’s life better without obligation, that they had a willingness to engage with the world to try to make it a less harsh place.
I wonder if Dr. Richardson read Krystalli and Schulz. Just kidding, I am old and this was before that article came out, but the resonance was so clear that I looked back at my careful anxious notes. I wonder if Dr. Richardson would have engaged with Hudson’s outlining of hospitality, and what it means to engage in the world and make it a less harsh place by inviting people into your most intimate spaces.
I struggled to write this reflection, I think because I really care about caring and it feels extra sensitive to me. I held tight onto Dr. Richardson’s perspectives because they validated my ambitions being born of, contextualized by and pushed forward alongisde a deep sense of care and love for what I want(ed) to do- and that caring and loving in a tangible way was reason enough to want to do, and a qualification for, human rights work. As I read through Krystalli and Schulz, and Hudson, the examples they present of care and love in building peace felt so familiar. In Vaittinen et al., they refer to a community of solidarity amongst women’s organizations in Northern Ireland as “unexceptional” (10). I bristled at this because even though it felt familiar, and even though they credibly claim that it was an ordinary occurrence, it still feels exceptional because the demonstration of care can be such an act of resistance. Vaittinen et al. go on to say that it is important to understand what it “takes to sustain life during conflict, and in their aftermath” (29) during conflict and peacetime alike, and its consistency is exceptional. Of all the social actions that humans clumsily try to do, the love and care is always there, somewhere.
I think it is so ironic that social scientists, and international relations scholars in particular, rebuke narratives of care and love. Social science is such an adoring practice – to love the world and its people so much you dedicate your life to understanding our complications.
Anyway, some questions:
1. When we think about building peace, who is carrying the burdens of demonstrative love and care? How do we build pathways for this labour to be most effectual?
2. Is it a bad thing for love and care to be political? What are the dangers?
3. (Thinking about seven generations forward and seven generations back) – what are the acts of care that preserved our lives to this point? Who cared for you before they knew you? What are the acts of care we are committed to as a demonstration of love for the next seven generations?
PS. I am sorry that it is the middle of the night. I took a 4-hour nap after the flu/COVID vaccine dose. Predictable but apparently not avoidable.
I am reminded of Suheir Hammad in ‘First Writing Since’—”affirm life, affirm life.” Across the readings this week, I was again prompted, as in previous weeks, to pay attention to the mundane and the political aspects of our everyday relationships. In mainstream discourse surrounding war and peace, it has become more intuitive to think of macro-level analyses as an expansion of knowledge—widening the scope of the inter- and intra-personal to analyse how groups, states, and institutions interact and collaborate to create and provide ‘security’. Because of these norms, it has become radical to consider how interpersonal sites of care and love influence larger social systems and broaden perceptions of war and resilience. With the literature in WPS focusing on intergroup violence and on the pains and gaping wounds of those affected, there is a sense of disservice to the humanity of victims/survivors of gender-based violence. For it is always helpful to be reminded by the fact that “in the midst and wake of violence, people also fall in love (Roxani & Schulz, 2022, p. 2).”
Berry (2022) notes that the notion of resilience needs to be restructured from neoliberal narratives that place the burden of social change to individuals rather than placing accountability on systems of oppression. Their article illustrated the idea that resilience is inherently relational because none of us live in isolation. The everyday actions we do for each other matter because they build a culture of relationality that transcends the capitalist value of individualism. Hudson (2021) explains Ubuntu feminism as involving identity, specifically accepting our dependence on others to survive. Barry (2022) echoes this sentiment by saying that “survival… [is] a collective project (p. 4).” A friend from a youth organization that I’m a part of recently put out a mutual aid post for urgent dental care and in two days his community raised enough money to get him the surgery he needed. It was a testament to how resilience and resistance are built around love. Community care is a way to resist systems that thrive when we are divided.
The act of love has been framed as a choice under colonialism. It is instead a reflex built into the human experience, and it is something that we owe to each other. In Roxani & Schulz (2022) victims/survivors of war remember their experiences of conflict and love certain aspects of it, for example of feeling nostalgic about the comradery and sense of belonging found in guerilla groups, or missing the way of life during wartime. Love is found everywhere across the lifespan of conflict. Love, beyond for each other and community, is felt for physical places and memories, grounding peoples’ continuous processes of healing. As bell hooks wrote, “It is essential to our struggle for self-determination that we speak of love. For love is the necessary foundation enabling us to survive the wars, the hardships, the sickness, and the dying with our spirits intact. It is love that allows us to survive whole.”
Questions:
1. “When things go badly, they are well documented… But when they go well, there’s silence (Roxani & Schulz, 2022, p. 16)” How do we write about love and care, or when things go right, without minimalizing the violence that surrounds it? How do we fill that silence without participating in other versions of silencing?
2. When care work becomes a form of institutionalised labour that’s compensated, can it undermine the experience of love?
I was really drawn to Marie Berry’s article on “Radicalizing resilience: mothering, solidarity, and interdependence among women survivors of war” because of its focus on what it means to be resilient. As I’ve mentioned in class before, I currently work on an podcast called Don’t Call Me Resilient that aims to respond to breaking news events through an anti-racist lens. The name of the podcast itself is a commentary on how being called resilient places the burden of adaptation to or acceptance of mistreatment on the individuals affected instead of the institutions driving insecurity in the first place. So as you might imagine, I was curious to learn about how my understanding of resilience might be challenged.
Berry of course acknowledges the critique upon which the title of the podcast was formed, but attempts to reframe resilience by offering arguments on the interdependent and relational nature of resilience and networks of care. And while I appreciate Berry’s attempt to move away from the “critique that relegates resilience to an individualized process of carrying on despite a violence and unjust status quo,” and actually find some of her arguments on solidarity and interdependency quite compelling, some of her perspectives left me with some discomfort and questions. In particular, I felt that a discussion on how oppressive infrastructures are designed to prevent networks of care from forming was missing. The care that comes from solidarity and interdependence feels grounded in the assumption that finding networks or a person to relate with is an easy or natural process. As we know, however, violence and sexual violence can be an extremely isolating event. Where was the acknowledgement about how systems of violence can isolate victims/survivors, turn victims/survivors against each other, and keep them apart?
In a later section on Solidarity, Berry discusses how she has been struck by the way many women recalled experiencing a shift in their own resilience after learning of others’ experiences they perceived to be more painful or extreme. My immediate reaction to reading this was: “but can’t this invalidate the painful and unfair traumas of their own experiences?.” Berry briefly mentions here that she has written about the problems related to the hierarchies of victimhood elsewhere, but doesn’t provide any justification for leaving it out of this article and doesn’t elaborate on the potential harms of what feels a little bit like a competition for most oppressed status.
Without the necessary context on these two sections, Berry’s attempt to radicalize understandings of resiliency felt oversimplified and incomplete. I did come away from the article with an expanded understanding of how the process of being resilient is supported and made easier through relationships and networks of care, but I still feel hesitant to employ labels of resiliency in a purely positive way.
Question:
What does policy-making that prioritizes love and care look like? How does it extend beyond developing spaces for connection and sharing?
The African feminist understanding of feminism in the context of conflict and war specifically, the idea of women cooperating with men without reversing gender roles surprised me. It highlighted the deep influence of patriarchal roots, where women are often expected to bear the burdens of care and love, while men are not held to the same standard. This perspective made me rethink the concept of collective action and the need to unlearn individualistic mindsets when discussing unity and mutual support.
The author connects global issues of Ubuntu feminism with human security, illustrating how care is often perceived as a responsibility assigned to women, localized within the family or home. This made me reflect on the everyday expectations placed on women to sacrifice their own dreams or goals in the name of care, as even slight deviations can be deemed unacceptable by society. Moreover, the normalization of violence, where the perpetrator and victim reconcile without justice being fully served, is something I have observed in many cases, where victims are often discouraged from seeking justice in favor of reaching a memorandum of understanding and the perpetrator is set free (sometimes family supports the perpetretor too stating their idea of innocence and blaming situations or victims).
In a similar vein, the concept of ethical care in conflict zones, deeply rooted in everyday experiences of insecurity, highlights the complexity of human and societal vulnerabilities. Krystalli’s work, which emphasizes taking love and care seriously, is a wake-up call to reconsider human relationships, even in contexts of severe violence and conflict. The author discusses the importance of healing and maintaining connections “in the wake” of conflict, urging us to rethink our definitions of care and love. The clear distinction of what should not be considered love or care resonated with my own understanding of these terms, particularly within the broader social context and web of relationships. This perspective led me to appreciate the resilience and relational connections of millions of women who seek support in counseling centers or shelters, not as symbols of victimhood, but as individuals in need of care.
Maja’s story deeply moved me, especially the need for supportive constants whether in the form of siblings, parents, friends, or other survivors who demonstrate unwavering dedication during challenging times. These “unsung s/heroes” are the true champions of peace. The resilience required to live with the trauma of brutal violence can only be achieved when care becomes the foundation for peace. This insight prompted me to reconsider existing resilience frameworks for post-war peacebuilding.
After reading all this, I have the following questions:
Given that care and love are subjective and drawn from individual experiences, what could be a powerful tool to integrate care and love into policymaking in conflict zones?
What is “care resilience,” and how can it be implemented to reinforce humanity in conflict and war zones?
Two points that were a common thread among the readings this week (I read Amya Agarwal’s chapter, Civilian and Caring Masculinities and the Questions of Justice in Kashmir as my third reading) were discussions of agency as well as the rejection of hyper-individualism.
To me, opening up the possibility for love and care as well as acknowledging the importance of relationality in situations where I have felt victimized has returned my own sense of agency. I think that quite often, narratives about victims or survivors do not leave space for discussions of agency within those situations and afterwards. I understand this, given that many conversations about the agency of victims can lead towards victim-blaming.
However, I think the readings opened space for discussion of agency without falling into the trap of victim-blaming. That is difficult to do because it involves navigating complexity and commitment to questioning the essentialization of certain groups, qualities, norms, or experiences. As Krystalli and Schulz said, “acknowledging the fact that moments of agency in spaces that, simultaneously, are permeated by violence requires holding multiple complex truths in one embrace” (17). Likewise, Agarwal discusses the multiple, overlapping manifestations of agency and vulnerability and the need to move beyond a dichotomy when discussing these issues (334).
I also appreciated the way the readings called into question the hyper-individualism that is a hidden assumption in many discussions of conflict, violence, and harm as well as peace, love, and care. Krystalli and Schulz explicitly question individualistic and neoliberal approaches and how these obscure relationalities, vulnerabilities, and dependencies. Hudson offers Ubuntu and Ubuntu feminism as an alternate lens through which to see peace-making as a communal responsibility and an exercise in solidarity.
Despite the feeling of “yes, this makes sense,” throughout much of the readings, I struggled to write this post. I found it a lot more difficult to read other people trying to grapple with holding space for multiple, complex truths than it is to do it myself. I still have a lot of questions.
I wonder what love and care really mean. Krystalli and Schulz explore possible definitions, but leave those definitions open to the interpretation of their interviewees. Still, I wonder what love and care mean to me. Krystalli and Schulz and Agarwal both cite bell hooks, and I have her books, Communion: the Female Search for Love and All About Love: New Visions at home, so I turned there. hooks defines love as both intention and action, as a choice, as “the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth,” and as something that cannot coexist with abuse. She describes care as a dimension of love (hooks, All About Love: New Visions, 4-8). I still wonder what that means in situations where conflict, harm, care, and love are all existing side-by-side. Maybe there is room for love and care as repair?
There’s so much more I wanted to mention that I won’t have the space for in this post. I wonder about essentialized narratives and who is harmed and helped by them. I wonder who dichotomies serve and who is served by their problematization. And for the millionth time in this course, I wonder what is known and by whom.
Questions:
1. What is love and care? Who gets to decide its parameters? When is a definition helpful and when is it harmful?
2. What does agency mean in the context of conflict and/or peace? Who has it? Who does not? What are the implications of narratives of having/not having agency?
3. How do individualistic and neoliberal approaches obscure relationalities, vulnerabilities, and dependencies?
4. Who is served by essentialized narratives of civilian/militarized masculinities? Who is harmed? And what are the implications of problematizing these essentialized narratives?
5. What is known? By whom?
I have to be honest; I mistakenly came into the readings this week hoping for a breather, a nice hopeful discussion of how love and care are entirely positive and transformative forces in conflict zones. Don’t get me wrong, there were certainly many examples of how love and care are integral to peace processes, a way to empower individuals and communities, and help heal survivors of trauma and war-related violence. I found the role of care in trust-building and peaceful transitions particularly interesting (Vaittinena et. al., 2019). However, in my optimism I forgot about a key reality; love is not an easy thing, and care is not some pure force independent of gendered violence or unequal burdens. I think that Krystalli and Schulz’s work capture this well in saying that “practices of love and care sit alongside violence and its echoes” (2022, p.3); by neglecting the political importance of love and care we deprive ourselves and our analyses of research and practical possibilities in our understanding of conflict. Upon reflection, I don’t think I was “taking love and care seriously” coming into this week.
Many of the readings highlighted this complex and nuanced relationship between love, violence, and care through key examples, all of which I found incredibly impactful. There was the story of the young girl who was brutally injured by a boy who was forced to hurt her, who was then instructed to treat her wounds as they cried together (Krystalli and Schulz, 2022, p.16). Berry also discusses the role of motherhood and radical maternal love as an aspect of resiliency, Nasira’s story emphasizing how targeting women in Palestine is “a way of threatening Palestine itself” (Berry, 2022, p.11). However, I was reminded of our previous reading and discussion on the politicization of Palestinian bodies during childbirth. This politicization is both an unfair burden and avenue for resistance as these women face violence and healthcare deprivation at military checkpoints (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2015). All of these examples illustrate the words of Nina, a former FARC combatant; “…there is love everywhere you look” (Krystalli and Schulz, 2022, p.17). This love and care can offer agency, it can offer roads to peace, but it doesn’t always exist as an antithesis to or cure for violence, but alongside it.
To help wrap up my thoughts, Hudson gives the example of a rebel boy in Sierra Leone who demanded a chicken at gunpoint, and a woman in the house offered him a biscuit and water, saying “He’s still somebody’s child” (Hudson, 2021, p.36). This story in particular reminded me of the Hozier song, Swan Upon Leda, which uses the ancient Greek myth of Leda and the Swan to discuss oppression against women, linking interpersonal violence to broader themes of colonial violence and resistance. One verse reminds me of these complex themes of love and violence, in a woman delivering presumably illegal medical care across a military checkpoint, “A graceful turner of heads; Weaves through the checkpoints like a needle and thread; Someone’s frightened boy waves her on; She offers a mother’s smile and soon she’s gone.”
I’m left with a couple of big questions on love, resistance, and what this means for peace outcomes:
How does perceiving love, care, and resilience as purely positive forces limit our understanding of both the role and potential of these forces in peace and security?
In situations where love and care are intertwined with violence, can these practices still be considered forms of resistance? How might such acts of care challenge or complicate conventional definitions of resistance in conflict zones?
As I’ve grown, I’ve tried to be more intentional with my words, understanding the weight they can carry for different people in certain situations. Through this class and my time in Vancouver, I’ve come to see that concepts like love and care carry profound meanings across different communities, shaping both individual experiences and collective values. Reflecting on this, I wonder how love and care can effectively work within contexts of violence and harm and how communities can use their varied meanings to create frameworks for resilience and recovery.
The framework of love and care as active, intentional forces demonstrates the work and labour that goes into these actions. Krystalli and Schulz emphasize that love and care are not passive states but conscious choices that manifest in behaviours, actions and priorities. In the context of violence and harm, these are so important when addressing trauma and destruction. Love and care are deliberate commitments to support others, and they require persistent effort and empathy.
I was particularly interested in Krystalli and Schulz’s concept of love and care as political acts and forms of resistance that enable communities to rebuild. Growing up, my parents and grandparents often mentioned the Lebanese lore of Beirut being destroyed and rebuilt seven times, associating it with the Phoenix, which is a symbol of rebirth in Lebanese-Phoenician history. The Phoenix is a firebird that rises from its ashes every five hundred years, embodying resilience and renewal. I see the Lebanese community as a phoenix, a community that can be and has been reborn through countless acts of care and solidarity. When communities welcome care into their lives as a deliberate, political choice, they reject narratives of division and misunderstanding perpetuated by systems of harm affecting welfare and livelihood.
Reflecting on these ideas, I recognize that community care is fundamentally rooted in the feeling of being understood and the capacity to grieve and heal together. This connection enables individuals within communities to support one another through shared suffering and resilience. Networks of care are essential for fostering resilience and solidarity; they create spaces where individuals can express their grief, share hope, and build strength together through love and care for each other.
So I ask:
• How can love and care, in all their varied interpretations, contribute to an effective framework for addressing violence and harm?
• What does it mean for a community when some individuals choose not to commit to love and care?
This week’s readings prompted me to think deeply about the roles of love and care in peacebuilding. I’ve always thought that creating lasting peace in conflict-affected communities is primarily about formal interventions, such as negotiations or economic aid. However, the authors suggest that genuine, transformative peace often emerges from acts of love and care in the everyday lives of those affected by violence.
Krystalli et al. describe how survivors in Uganda and Colombia turn to each other for support, creating networks to share resources and provide emotional comfort. The article challenges conventional views of love and care, presenting them not as passive traits linked to heteronormative ideals but as active practices in peacebuilding. It highlights that practice of love and care coexists with violence, and examining this relationship reveals what is usually left out in discussions on peacebuilding, negotiations, and conflict resolution in war context. Love and care are rarely included in these discussions because they are often seen as too personal. Yet, the article shows that integrating care into conflict resolution is essential; in these contexts, care is not just a survival mechanism but a powerful means of community rebuilding. Survivors’ groups become spaces for people to share stories and lean on each other, addressing immediate needs while fostering resilience and solidarity. This insight makes me realize how much we underestimate the importance of informal support systems in healing from trauma. The idea of love and care as core elements in peacebuilding also brings me to a deeper understanding of politics itself. The statement that “politics is a conversation about what it means to be a human being within the realm of social action” deeply moved me, as it reminds me to see love and care not as private emotions but as political practices that shape human connections and create pathways to peace.
Hudson’s discussion of African philosophy of Ubuntu and collective responsibility also expanded my view on peacebuilding. Ubuntu reframes peace as something inherently collective—a responsibility shared by everyone in a community. Peacebuilding approaches that I’m familiar with focused on rights and formal structures, reflecting much of what I encountered in my previous work. Ubuntu, however, reorients this by emphasizing that true peace comes when each person’s well-being is seen as part of the whole. This perspective suggests the incorporation of empathy and communal responsibility when generating policies and interventions. Rather than relying solely on governments or NGOs, peacebuilding could be seen as a community-wide effort, where everyone has a role in maintaining harmony and supporting each other.
Agarwal’s account of Imran and the concept of “caring masculinities” is eye-opening. It shows that there are ways of embodying masculinity in conflict zones that reject violence and focus on protection and care. Imran’s approach offers an alternative to the militarized masculinity often glorified in these settings, where strength is equated with violence. His courage lies in advocating for human rights and providing support for those affected by violence, challenging stereotypes that equate masculinity with dominance. This perspective is inspiring, as it shows that peacebuilding isn’t just about addressing external violence; it also involves transforming internal, social dynamics.
Question:
How could peacebuilding that emphasizes love, care, and community responsibility alter existing power structures in violence-affected societies?
I really enjoyed reading about Ubuntu feminism and how it can not only be used as a philosophy to end and prevent conflict but also used in everyday life. I want to believe that for the past several years I have been actively trying to slowly improve my ability to empathize with individuals around me, especially those I deeply care about, by being more capable of relating to others. One of the important aspects of Ubuntu feminism mentioned in Hudson’s article was about the ‘freedom to relate’ and how shared security can be found by looking at and understanding commonalities across genders instead of only looking at identical characteristics within a particular group (Hudson, 2021, p. 36). Being able to relate and reach out to others, as briefly mentioned in the article, is something I value a lot, and I admire individuals that can do this very well. Even though the article mostly covered this concept as it relates to war and conflict, I think it is applicable for everyone in daily life, as being able to relate to people is something I consider an incredibly valuable skill when it comes to community and friendship building. I found Hudson’s application of this aspect of Ubuntu feminism on a scale that is not just on a local or individual level to be very helpful, as even though I considered this to be incredibly important on an individual level, I had not previously encountered how this ontological approach could be done in the realm of global security politics. I do agree with the author that ‘care’ is a global political issue. I, however, did not realize how states ‘care for’ their citizens has a direct impact on global security (Hudson, 2021, p. 37). One of the main reasons why I began this program was because I believed that states should exist to best ‘care for’ their citizens and I wanted to learn how to best do that, and this article has made me realize that I should adjust how I personally approach this topic in policy as I continue to learn during this program.
Similarly, Krystalli’s and Schulz’s article further challenged my pre-existing ideas of love and care and how they could be applied to conflict and global or international politics. Much of my prior ideas and constructions of war and conflict were rather black and white, and ‘love and care’ had virtually no place in them. This article challenged me to re-visit these prior notions I had about these topics and made me realize that nothing in the world is ever truly black and white. For example, I did not quite understand what “relations of dependency care can be cruel as much as loving” (Krystalli & Schulz, 2022, p. 5) really meant during my first reading of the article. After another reading and a more thorough reflection on this feminist perspective, I understood it better and it taught me that I should definitely stop trying to define everything as strictly black and white when nothing truly is. This was one of those few moments where a single sentence really held a ton of symbolic meaning to me while reading through an entire article. A lot of points and examples in this article actually reminded me of some of our readings during week 3 in this course, particularly when we read about the troubling experiences of some women’s experiences during partition.
My question is based off Luciana’s reflections on page 19 from Krystalli’s and Schulz ’s (2022) article, and that is: Why is inquiring about love and care (especially in war and conflict) so gendered in research and journalism? Men should be encouraged more to talk about their feelings and emotions too (and women should understandably be asked about other everyday stuff like men are, emotions are applicable to every person regardless of gender identity).
I felt quite intrigued by this week’s readings. However because this method of framing is new to me (although warmly embraced), perhaps my language might not make sense. But a couple of days ago, while discussing our assigned artist, I looked at Elena with light in my eyes and perhaps a lightbulb at the top of my head as I elatedly exclaimed “ITS LIKE GARDENING!!!!”
When we meet, when we gather, we are constructing a social site. And imbued in our gathering is a politics. The social fabric is then a territoire upon which we toil and draw from it resilience and most importantly sustenance. The same is the case in gardening, our interactions with it might change in relation to its needs, and yet the effort is sustained in the hope of a new budding blossom finding its way to reach the light again.
I know this sounds rather positive but it does come with politically philosophical questions that were brought up in the readings like: Who does the care? or How much of the care am I accountable for?
The land upon which we toil, is a colonial body. We know this as the Earth has inherited the bodies that have brought us here. However, in transcending the grief inherited. I was called to widen my frame of life and love. And thus In parallel to Nasira’s story in Berry (2022), I thought of the resilience of the Palestinian olive wood tree. I was reading about Basma, an artisan in Bethlehem, who described planting the trees as marked by an intention “to remain long after they are gone, letting the people who come after them know that their hands also laid seeds into the ground, pruned the branches, and nourished the soil beneath it.” The intentionality behind such actions transcends immediate utility, positioning current acts of praxis as enduring markers of a legacy that asserts the continuity of collective labor and care. Such gestures I have found to be laden with symbolic permanence, conveying that future generations are witnesses to an embodied history—a testament that hands once engaged in sowing, tending, and cultivating the living landscape. Such acts inscribe resilience and communal memory into the physical environment, establishing an enduring narrative of interconnected stewardship that persists beyond individual lifetimes. And what must be realized in this process, is that this is the method that sustains life.
And so I wanted to end with the question:
What do you do today out of love and rooted in care for a future generation?
Article: https://ethik.co/blogs/news/the-resilience-of-palestinians-olive-wood-trees
I think I need to read Krystalli and Shulz’s piece again. In terms of the core argument– take love and care seriously– I am sold (it was an easy sale). I loved the quote that returned attention to how, “Yet, in the midst and wake of violence, people also fall in love, forge social and intimate relationships, and extend different forms of care to one another.” This brought me back to our earlier conversations on the everyday. The authors’ critique of overemphasis on limiting the “field of vision to death and suffering”, together with the reference to Eve Tuck’s work on damage-centred research, was a bit of a call out, because I love talking about death and suffering. I think it’s possible I’ve gone a bit overboard with loving talking about death and suffering, because although I’ve spent comparatively a lot of time in my short little career talking about grief and trauma-informed care, I’ve never really parsed out the “care” part, and I don’t think I’ve spent even a fraction of the time talking about love.
At the same time, several pieces came up in this article came up which I will need to spend more time thinking about, which does stress to me the benefits of not doing the readings at the last minute, but alas, here we are in early November. The Shulz & Krystalli piece was a bit of a pandora’s box to me, because once they made the sale about taking love and care seriously, the specifics of navigating the multiple truths of the coexistence of love and violence became very messy to me. I love the concept of remaking worlds, but how do we go about doing the remaking when the remaking is clumsy, and we are clumsy? How much does intention matter- is it enough to do all things with love (and care)? On the one hand, the authors cite an interlocutor in Uganda who describes how “you can only ever support victims of war when you have them in your heart”, and yet, we see the example of the bureaucrats in Columbia describing how they did work with heart and love, which felt uncomfortable to read about it. So it seems fair to say that while support workers might believe they are acting with love, but inadvertently be making harmful choices, which the authors do recognize from what I understood. I think the easy out here is to go with social sciences answer that love is a necessary but not sufficient condition for meaningful victim/survivor support work, but I just feel like it’s more complicated than that, although I can’t quite articulate why.
I am very tempted to return to the concept of listening/hearing across harm, which is my latest favourite topic to think about, but for the sake of not being a broken record I won’t. Instead I want to reference a concept from Mia Mingus that she uses in her disability advocacy work, called access intimacy. For anyone who hasn’t come across it, access intimacy is “the […] hard to describe feeling when someone else ‘gets’ your access needs”. In other words, it’s a feeling of being understood and seen, and where a person’s needs are being met. Mia Mingus describes it as a feeling of “closeness I would feel with people who my disabled body felt a little bit safer and at ease with.” (Mingus, 2011). It’s not necessarily a huge sweeping action– “sometimes [access intimacy] is someone just sitting and holding your hand while you both stare back at an inaccessible world”.
I love this concept because I think it makes engaging with disability advocacy approachable and straightforward, especially in an area where people may not feel like they “know where to start”. It also expresses the solidarity, empathy, and “hearing across harm” that was coming up in the readings this week. And yet, we also need to know how to manage multiple and contradicting experiences– what happens if one person thinks they were acting out of love, care, or access intimacy, but that was not the experience of the person on the receiving end? Again, this returns to the issue of harm and love coexisting, and how much intention matters. I myself am feeling quite clumsy in my analysis this week so perhaps this is actually the perfect place for me to start.
My questions are:
With love and care, how much does intention matter? How do we actually navigate this on the day to day, and how do we make room for experiences of harm within love and care?
Is love inherently political?
Where does care happen? What does it mean for us when we move beyond state centric perceptions of care, and where do we actually need the state to conceptualize care?
What would happen if a “different kind of war story” was represented in the media? How can we tell better war stories? What even is a war story? (spiraling)
What would the world look like if we valued feminine traits just as if not more than masculine traits?
This is what I have been exploring most in my thoughts throughout the weeks in this class. For me, the readings this week spoke to the feminist future that has come up often in our discussions. A future that centers love and care.
I found it interesting the readings did not touch on paid care work. I know they were speaking mostly about everyday relational care within communities but paid care work is also an important pillar in communities. Women are disproportionally employed in care work fields (nurses, childcare, retirement homes, social workers, etc). Even though care work is essential to society, this type of work is notoriously underpaid and underappreciated. In a capitalist neoliberal society, those who devote their careers and lives to caring for others are not appreciated because their work does not directly contribute to the GDP. We have created a system that values those focused on individual capital gains. Think of how the economy would be different if it was organized around love and care. How would that change policy?
After reading these articles I was thinking about all the problems Canada is facing because care is not centered. Our crumbling healthcare system, the opioid crisis, a shortage of teachers, and daycare workers, etc. Would this be different if love and care were the centre of policymaking? If politicians prioritized care for individuals over the growth of the economy or corporations? Maybe this is how we have to tackle these issues, with a centred policy framework.
Over the summer I worked for a company called Minivillage. They are a community-building organization whose goal is to foster meaningful community connections specifically in apartment buildings. One of their main motivations is to increase community and individual resiliency. They believe connected communities are more resilient. I thought of this when reading Berry (2022). Resilience is not individual but relational. I saw this firsthand this summer when I interviewed residents in buildings Minivillage had partnered with. The buildings I engaged with were all affordable housing with many residents having lived through trauma and other tough situations. They all echoed the same sentiment, it is their community that has helped them the most. The strong community these buildings fostered helped support their recovery, and it went both ways. Residents valued being able to support other people as well. By focusing on strengthening communities rather than supporting individuals, communities become more resilient which in turn helps individuals become more resilient.
I asked many questions throughout this post but I guess my main questions are
How can we center care in policymaking? What would a future look like if love and care shaped policy? How would the world be different if policy focused on strengthening communities rather than supporting individuals?
This week’s readings merged ideas from previous weeks poignantly: the importance of interconnectedness, political reflexivity, genuine interest in others’ wellbeing, and love in getting to know one another and creating community linked the articles. Centering relational resilience, Ubuntu feminism, and an ethics of care, my mind can’t help but make the connection to how our own class has acted in alignment with the readings. The hospitality of sharing a warm coffee together and being invited to participate in sacred cultural traditions, the comfort we give and receive from one another when we tear up, and the solidarity that we extend to each other in affirming difficult experiences we share with vulnerability all contribute to the environment in our classroom. The sense of community we’ve cultivated is something that I think many of us can feel, embodied. Feelings of safety, support, shared grief, and shared hope. “The love that Maria narrated transcended romance, or the love for a single person or community, to encompass a sense of place, a way of living, and a way of relating to other sentient beings” (Krystalli & Schulz, 2022, pg.18). I’m already missing our group seminar discussions and the semester’s not even over yet!
Of course, the readings also described the many multi-faceted layers of love and care. In the Krystalli and Schulz article, the complexity of someone being both a source of care and harm in conflict settings was very interesting to read about–it makes me think back to our week on militarisation and the string of difficult decisions that human beings have to make in the systems that govern us. The army as a potential place of economic freedom for the solider, but also for possible mental and physical anguish, a mix of pride and shame. On the flip side of that is the love and camaraderie that former members of combatant groups could feel for one another, or their environment, even in the threat of great danger: “Maria told me she missed living in the jungle. ‘Not the war, not the weapon. The jungle” (pg. 17).
The Berry radicalising resilience reading asks us, “How much stronger would our peacebuilding processes be if humanitarian actors and peacebuilding practitioners structured their gender programming around forging interdependence and community well-being rather than individual success?” (Berry, 2022, pg.12). For those of us in the public policy program, I wonder how we might be able to integrate care webs and community well-being into different fields of policy (ex. security, GBV prevention, sustainability, development) that have various levels of open-mindedness towards non-individualistic/hegemonic solutions to institutional problems? How do we redefine what is deemed “professional” to include genuine care and interest in wellbeing as a priority in the workplace, rather than a purely capitalist-oriented environment where companies exchange support for improved worker output?
I mentioned in an earlier post that over the summer I had the opportunity of working with Erin (and Liliane :D) over the summer on their research on women with disabilities in post-conflict northern Uganda and the peacebuilding process. Part of what I was helping with was in co-writing a chapter on the use of body-maps as a research method: body-maps are life-size drawings of one’s body done with the support of whoever is participating in the activity. Part of what Erin, Liliane and the whole team in Uganda were trying to achieve, beyond the research/academic factor of trying to understand the lived experiences of the women in northern Uganda, was how can the researcher practice love and care when talking about very sensitive and difficult topics. Within the larger conversation of war and peace, and beyond the use of body-maps (which as an arts-based research method has the possibility to allow greater agency to the people participating as well as allowing them to share what sometimes cannot be told in simple words), the concept of love, care, and reciprocity were at the forefront of every interaction between the research team and the women in Gulu, Uganda.
The article by Marie Berry really struck as tying a lot of things we have been discussing in the past few weeks, like women and their experience of war, their resistance and resilience after war and what do we understand as peace/war and the way relationships can be formed in the aftermath of violence. I think this is the first time in the class that after the readings that even though I still kind of think we’d be better off if a meteor hit Earth, seeing and reading the stories of love, care and resilience show to me that the way things are do not have to be that way. It is kind of inspiring.
I think I’m struggling to put my thoughts into words, but one thing that I kept thinking about is a book I read two-ish months ago; it is called “The Briar Club” by Kate Quinn. There is obviously a lot more to it than what how I am relating it to this week’s topics (it is historical fiction after all, and so of course there is a little bit of drama to go with it) but a big part of the theme of the book is the creation of community and kinship. The story revolves around the lives of seven women living together in a boarding house in Washington D.C. during the height of the McCarthyism. But what truly makes the book is that they all have very different lived experiences of the war, they are living the Red Scare in many different ways because of said lived experiences but every single Thursday, they come together and have a meal and enjoy the company of each other. They (for the most part) grow to love and care about each other during a time where neighbors were against neighbors and when there was a sense of mistrust. Like I said, my thoughts are all over the place but hopefully you can all see the connections I made between the readings and this book.
Question:
1. Love and care in the context of WPS, is seen as a form of resilience and resistance because of the way academia has framed war and the peace building process. How can we move beyond that in order for love and care to be considered as a “given” action to take during difficult and violent times?
Years ago, a professor of mine brought in Dr. Sophie Richardson, who was at that point the China Director at Human Rights Watch, to talk to us about advocacy. “Advocacy,” she said, “is just asking people to do something good.” Because we were all anxious fourth-year social sciences undergraduate students, most of our questions of her revolved around How To Get Jobs. I took careful anxious notes on How To Get A Job and then there was a global pandemic so whatever. But one thing she said, that I did not write down, stuck with me. She talked about interviewing a candidate for an internship who professed that they had no experience working in human rights. Then, Dr. Richardson asked them about a gap in their resume, and they said they had taken two years away from work and school to care for their grandmother in Mexico who had suffered a stroke, to which Dr. Richardson said, “that is human rights work.” Her point was (and this, I did write down) that what she looked for in job candidates is that at some point, they had gone out and done something to try to make somebody’s life better without obligation, that they had a willingness to engage with the world to try to make it a less harsh place.
I wonder if Dr. Richardson read Krystalli and Schulz. Just kidding, I am old and this was before that article came out, but the resonance was so clear that I looked back at my careful anxious notes. I wonder if Dr. Richardson would have engaged with Hudson’s outlining of hospitality, and what it means to engage in the world and make it a less harsh place by inviting people into your most intimate spaces.
I struggled to write this reflection, I think because I really care about caring and it feels extra sensitive to me. I held tight onto Dr. Richardson’s perspectives because they validated my ambitions being born of, contextualized by and pushed forward alongisde a deep sense of care and love for what I want(ed) to do- and that caring and loving in a tangible way was reason enough to want to do, and a qualification for, human rights work. As I read through Krystalli and Schulz, and Hudson, the examples they present of care and love in building peace felt so familiar. In Vaittinen et al., they refer to a community of solidarity amongst women’s organizations in Northern Ireland as “unexceptional” (10). I bristled at this because even though it felt familiar, and even though they credibly claim that it was an ordinary occurrence, it still feels exceptional because the demonstration of care can be such an act of resistance. Vaittinen et al. go on to say that it is important to understand what it “takes to sustain life during conflict, and in their aftermath” (29) during conflict and peacetime alike, and its consistency is exceptional. Of all the social actions that humans clumsily try to do, the love and care is always there, somewhere.
I think it is so ironic that social scientists, and international relations scholars in particular, rebuke narratives of care and love. Social science is such an adoring practice – to love the world and its people so much you dedicate your life to understanding our complications.
Anyway, some questions:
1. When we think about building peace, who is carrying the burdens of demonstrative love and care? How do we build pathways for this labour to be most effectual?
2. Is it a bad thing for love and care to be political? What are the dangers?
3. (Thinking about seven generations forward and seven generations back) – what are the acts of care that preserved our lives to this point? Who cared for you before they knew you? What are the acts of care we are committed to as a demonstration of love for the next seven generations?
PS. I am sorry that it is the middle of the night. I took a 4-hour nap after the flu/COVID vaccine dose. Predictable but apparently not avoidable.