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How Matters: Women's International League for Peace and Freedom's Trips to the Middle East, 1931–1975
Author(s) -
Confortini Catia Cecilia
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
peace and change
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1468-0130
pISSN - 0149-0508
DOI - 10.1111/pech.12023
Subject(s) - feminism , trips architecture , oppression , politics , league , ideology , sociology , middle east , gender studies , political science , law , physics , astronomy , parallel computing , computer science
This paper follows a 1975 WILPF's “fact‐finding trip” to the Middle East and compares it to previous WILPF's official and unofficial trips to the area. My purpose is to analyze and to assess the extent to which these trips can be called “feminist” and the extent to which feminism makes a difference in the kind of “fact‐finding trip” that is undertaken and its results. Though there arguably exist several “feminisms,” I argue that certain common elements exist that make political actions feminist. Historians of WILPF (such as Gertrude Bussey, Margaret Tims, Harriet Alonso, Leila Rupp) have primarily focused on the ideological and political aspects of WILPF's feminist peace politics. Instead, I am interested in how feminism can inform the methodology of peace politics. I take the example of WILPF's trips to the Middle East to specifically illustrate how a peace politics, sustained by feminist methodological principles, is more fully “peaceful.” Without those principles any political action risks replicating structures of oppression, which are both the bases for violent conflict and the foundations for unjust systems, which then cannot be called “peace.”