Nations and Nationalism 6 (4), 2000, 61 1-29.

0 ASEN 2000

The anti-essentialist choice:

nationalism and feminism in the
interaction between two women’s
projects
CYNTHIA COCKBURN
Department of Sociology, City University, Northampton Square,
London ECl V OHB

ABSTRACT. Two cross-national women’s organisations, one in Northern Ireland the

other in Bosnia-Herzegovina, are observed here in interaction with each other. The
article explores the connection between their ability to sustain such cross-community
alliances and their choice to be women’s projects. In so doing, it addresses the
question ‘are feminism and nationalism compatible?’ Not all the women are ‘anti-
nationalist’ in philosophy, but they draw distinctions between variants of nationalism,
and may be described as ‘anti-essentialist’. The article distinguishes between variants
of ‘feminism’, recognising it, too, as a plurality of movements. An anti-essentialist
understanding of ethnicity and nation is partnered in both the Network and Medica
by an anti-essentialist feminism, in which a woman’s family role is minimised and
value placed instead o n her autonomy and agency. Certain forms of feminism and
nationalism are thus compatible - but the configuration may be progressive or
retrograde.

The autumn of 1995 was a positive moment in the troubled contemporary

histories of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Northern Ireland. In Bosnia the
signing of the General Framework Agreement for peace in Dayton, Ohio,
had halted the slaughter. And in Northern Ireland, a ceasefire declared the
year before had brought a welcome remission that might even lead to a
permanent peace. At local level, in the cities of Belfast and Zenica, the
ending of armed conflict had brought relief from immediate fears and a
cautious optimism about the restoration of everyday life.

Northern Ireland and Bosnia-Herzegovina: two women’s projects

That autumn, two women’s organisations, the Women’s Support Network

in Belfast and Medica Women’s Association in Zenica,’ joined the author in
a research exercise.* The Women’s Support Network is an umbrella
612 Cynthia Cockburn

organisation, drawing together representatives of an array of women’s

community centres and other projects serving poor working-class districts of
the city. It is unusual in being a working alliance of women from both
Catholic/Nationalist and Protestant/Unionist communities. Together they
campaign for better representation of the needs of women as a whole,
within the political system, the peace process and funding programmes.
Medica Women’s Association, the Bosnian organisation, differs from the
Network in structure and purpose. It is a medical and psychosocial project
established during the war of 1992-5 to respond to the needs of women
raped and traumatised in other ways in the violence, and of their children.
Due to the ethnic segregation effected by the war, the majority of the
project team and the refugees they serve are Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim). But
the organisation is inclusive by principle, and both staff and beneficiaries
include women bearing Bosnian Serb, Bosnian Croat and other ethno-
national names, as well as women in mixed marriages or born of mixed
families.
The world’s media often depict the wars in Northern Ireland and the
former Yugoslavia as ‘ethnic wars’, suggesting they were wars between
‘peoples who hate each other’. This is misleading, for much of the causation
in both wars has been internal political power-play and external pressure.
But the wars can be said to have been ‘ethnic wars’ in one sense: they were
producers of ethnicity, pursued to strengthen, clarify or adjust the claim of
certain groups in relation to nation-statehood. In some ways they were
brought about to constitute or seal ethnic identities, distinctions and
loyalties, and to render them inescapable (Zarkov 1999).
It was clear that, so far as Medica and the Network were concerned, the
war-makers had failed in their purpose. The women were stubbornly
refusing the labelling and dividing process. They had not allowed threats to
stop them crossing borders and talking to people that their political, military
and religious leaders designated the enemy. Nor had the persuasions of
ethnicist and nationalist discourse succeeded in fixing their identities. In my
work with them I learned to be sceptical of ethnonyms like ‘Catholic’ or
‘Croat’, using them the way they do - in imaginary quotation marks.
The Women’s Support Network had begun in an unusual partnership
between the women’s centres of the ProtestantIUnionist Shankill Road
and the Catholic/Republican Falls Road, that first united to protest
against political discrimination in Belfast City Council’s funding policy.
From this small start the Network grew until twenty-five organisations
were grouped in a non-sectarian and inclusive alliance. Many of their
activities have involved cross-border partnerships with women in the
Republic of Ireland.
In the case of Medica Women’s Therapy Centre, the women who joined
the staff in 1993 were identifiable less as members of distinct ethnic groups
than as a slice of Zenica’s mixed pre-war population, still in this
government-held city because they refused to identify with projects of ethnic
The anti-essentialist choice 613

separation. Throughout the war, Medica had the support of women’s

groups in both Belgrade and Zagreb, the ‘enemy capitals’, with whom they
maintained e-mail and phone contact. Not long after the peace agreement
was signed a party of Medica women, defying nationalist intimidation,
crossed the Inter-Entity Border Line to re-establish contact with the
women’s organisation Duga, in Banja Luka, the Bosnian Serb capital. The
meeting was facilitated by feminists from Belgrade and Zagreb. Medica also
took advantage of the cessation of fighting to send representatives to
meetings and conferences throughout the region, happily discovering that a
‘Yugoslavia-wide’ feminist network had, if anything, gained impetus from
the segmentation of Yugoslavia.
The research I began in autumn 1995 was set up to study how the
Network and Medica had conceived, materialised and maintained their
democratic, inclusive, boundary-crossing organisations. This was completed
in 1997 and the findings published in 1998 (Cockburn 1998).’ The research
continued, however, into a second phase, and then a third. Through my
work with them, the projects had become aware of each other’s existence.
They now wanted to meet. Our project had from the start been conceived as
action-research, open to any development and change that might flow from
it for the organisations (and for me).4 So we organized a workshop at
Mijas, in Spain, for a small group of representative women from Medica,
the Network and Bat Shalom. At the Mijas workshop, the women decided
they wanted to pursue their relationship further still, in an exchange of visits
so that they could observe each others’ practice at first-hand. I raised
funding for this, still within the framework of my continuing research. In
June and July 1998, I accompanied four women from Bosnia spending two
weeks as the guests of the Network in Belfast. A month later, four women
travelled from Northern Ireland to Zenica where we spent two weeks as the
guests of M e d i ~ a . ~
During the interaction between Medica and the Network, women
inevitably drew each other into quite explicit discussion of their political
identifications. One thing I was therefore able to explore was their
representation of, and relationship to, nationalism and feminism, and the
compatibility of the two in shaping individual and organisational identities.
Divergent positions within the organisations became more visible, some
women emerging as strongly opposed to nationalism, others seeing national
movements as historically necessary and potentially creative. Some women
called themselves ‘feminists’; others were ambivalent about this term. Why
had these differences not destabilised their alliances?
I will suggest that much hinges on the fact that nationalism and feminism
are plural phenomena, so that an element of flexibility and choice resides in
their usage. In particular, both contain an essentialist and anti-essentialist
variant. The women of Medica and the Network rejected the former and
deployed the latter. It was the consistency of this choice that had made
alliance possible.
614 Cynthia Cockburn

Critical engagement with nationalism

At the Mijas workshop, each participating organisation faced the challenge

of presenting to the others an account of their country and the history of its
national movements and its wars, in terms that felt equally comfortable to
women of conflictual national ‘names’. The result was some narrative that
was collectively agreed, but, also, some individual divergence from it.
Maureen5 was one Belfast woman who identified herself clearly as a
nationalist.
It’s hard for me to be objective about it, because I rim a nationalist. It’s Irish
nationalism, which has a specific meaning for me, and I feel very proud to belong to
a tradition of nationalism that over the years has been shaped by other radical
influences. It’s been influenced by feminism, and by socialism and liberalism. I know
that there’s another kind of nationalism that’s extremely dangerous and oppressive
. . . It’s related to land and who owns the land. This kind of nationalism has always
been violent and savage, but I still believe that there is a nationalism which allows
sharing. Different people who live in the land bring in their cultures and arguments,
and in doing so, you also create an overall culture which is a mix of all the different
cultures. This could be a form of nationalism that we haven’t seen yet.

Helen was ambivalent, feeling she was driven deeper into a British national
identity by Irish nationalism. ‘For me, IRA violence has encouraged me to
hold onto my British identity. So it’s not because I love Britain, it’s because
I hate people telling me what to do.’ Liz on the other hand (whose family,
like Helen’s, comes mainly from a Protestant tradition) said:
I understand nationalism in its beginnings to mean the right of a people to rule their
own destiny. But the problem to me is, who decides what a nation is? For me, living
in Ireland, I would agree with Maureen politically, in that my hopes would be the
same. But I don’t call myself a nationalist. I believe there are many dangers in
nationalism. Because my experience has been, not just in Ireland but from what I’ve
seen throughout the world, that nationalism sets up a principle of a certain type of
people, and then the people have to try to fit into that nationalism.

And Carol had a clear detachment from national belonging, seeing the
conflict between British and Irish nationalism as an ‘after-effect of
colonialism’.
f was brought u p to feel British but 1 never felt nationhood was very important. As
a child we wrote letters to each other and we put the address as ‘Belfast, County
Antrim, Northern Ireland, British Isles, Europe, the World, the Universe’, as though
we were a little part of a great big jigsaw. For me it’s not so important what the
country is called, what matters is the type of government and the amount of say
people have over their lives. If the situation changed so that there was a United
Ireland and good government by and for the people, I’d be happy enough to change
my nationality. If Britain was involved and the power handed down to people
equally, it wouldn’t matter. My parents would fight for it to remain British. But I
wouldn’t lose any sleep. That’s my very personal view of nationalism.
The anti-essentialist choice 615

Among the Bosnian women too there were differences. The recent massacres
of people for their supposed ethnic identity had, unsurprisingly, given a very
negative spin in Bosnia to the words ‘ethnic’ and ‘national’. They meant
hatred, exclusion and violence. Most women therefore sharply distinguished
themselves from ‘nationalists’. Jelena even felt she somehow lacked the
national bone in her body. Like many of the Medica women, she had been
among those who had preferred to identify as ‘Yugoslav’ in federal
Yugoslavia, rather than as belonging to one of the constituent nations. Her
family’s Orthodox past had not featured much in her sense of self.
First we had Yugoslavia. Then we lost it. When that happened I felt naked. I asked
myself all the time - because from my grandparents and parents I had this Serb
background. But maybe through my own fault I grew up without this feeling, this
base. Now it’s difficult for me at age forty to build up this identity. It’s somehow
underdeveloped.

But if you were a Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) a collectivity against which

resurgent Serb and Croat national movements had been honing their
identities and making war, you could come to value a sense of your own
nationhood. Nudzejma, a practising Muslim, said
My personal feeling before was that when someone said nationalism, it meant
something bad. Because I lived in an environment where only Serb nationalism was
on the surface, and other kinds were unstated. But now, when I think back - the
Muslim nation in Bosnia only got the right to declare themselves Muslims in 1971.
Before that we had to say we were Croats or Serbs or ‘undeclared’, and that did
affect me a lot during my life. So I realised that Muslims did have to have their own
nationalism . . . Before the war we didn’t feel a need, or an obligation, to emphasise
our nationality as Bosniaks, the official term. But from the moment we saw everyone
else is feeling nationalistic, something came up inside of us and said ‘yes, we want to
have our nationalism too’ . .. 1 am for nationalism, but in a positive sense, a
nationalism which exists to fulfil some ideals in co-existence with other nationalisms
existing in the area . . . We don’t have any other nation and we don’t want to give it
UP.
National belonging in both these countries is a killing issue. On what basis
do women so differently positioned with regard to nationalism and anti-
nationalism coexist and cooperate? It is not that there are no tensions over
such differences. But they are survivable, I began to see, because the
nationalism some say they are espousing, and others are willing to tolerate,
is not just any nationalism.
Theorists of nationalism widely accept that it is not a unitary phenom-
enon but a plural one. It has been described as ‘protean’, a ‘rich variety of
movements and ideologies’ (Smith 1996: 358). It is ‘diverse’ and ‘fluid’
(Miller 1996: 409). An ethnic nationalism, with a cult of origins, is
sometimes contrasted with a civic nationalism, involving more negotiated
belongings (Ignatieff 1993). Impassioned, revolutionary nationalisms are
sometimes counterposed to ‘official nationalisms’ - a form they too may
616 Cynthia Cockburn

take when they achieve power (Anderson 1983). Jan Nederveen Pieterse
similarly deconstructs ethnicity - representing it as a continuum, with wide
variation in terms of salience, intensity and meaning. Ethnic identity may be
merely an option, held lightly. Or it may become competitive with other
ethnicities. Aspiring to power, an ethnicity becomes a project for nation-
hood. Dominant, it may achieve nation-statehood (Pieterse 1997). But a
significant questionmark then hangs over the state. If the state is governed
by a social formation that remains nationalist, can it ever be fully inclusive
and democratic? Is ‘civic’ nationalism a contradiction in terms?
The dimension to nationalism that emerged as important in the encounter
between the two women’s organisations was that of essentialism versus anti-
essentialism. At any moment on the trajectory of the national project, the
most negative variants of nationalism are those that reduce nationality to an
essence. The source may be represented as genetic. Or it may be represented
as culture, in a timeless and homogeneous form. As Nira Yuvdl-Davis puts
it, ‘the myth of common origin or shared blood/genes tends to construct the
most exclusionary/homogeneous visions of “the nation”’ (Yuval-Davis
1997: 21). It tends, in Eric Hobsbawm’s words, towards ‘the murderous
reductio ad absurdum of nationalism in its territorial version’, logically
headed for mass expulsions and genocide (Hobsbawm 1990: 133). By
contrast, more positive national movements are those in which working-
class or anti-colonial projects, informed by socialism and egalitarianism,
adopt national identity as one of their several mobilising ideas. This kind of
nationalism looks to the future rather than the past, and does not define
‘the people’ by bloodline, tradition or religion (Cockburn 1998).
At the Mijas workshop it was clear that even those women who described
themselves as nationalist were not buying into a fundamentalist myth of
primordial nationhood. Maureen saw ‘her’ nationalism as a resistance
movement against imperialist injustice, with a socialist-inspired egalitar-
ianism. After all, as two relatively non-partisan analysts of the conflict put
it, ‘The “centuries of foreign oppression” thesis advanced by Irish
nationalists and socialists, for all its emotive colouration, is not without
validity’ (O’Leary and McGarry 1993: 102). When I later asked Maureen
whether she would still be a nationalist if Ireland were a unified state
governed by Irish nationalists, she answered, ‘I believe that Irish nationalism
would transmute into something less narrow as it achieved power. After all,
the thrust of the nationalist agenda for peace in Northern Ireland today is
an equality agenda.’ It does not follow from Maureen’s self-positioning that
others would share her optimism, but it is possible to see why they might
understand and tolerate it.
The Bosnian Muslim nationalism of Nudzejma and some other Bosniak
women in Medica they also represented as defensive and civic. It is widely
recognised that Bosnian Muslim identity has differed from its two
competitors, Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Serb nationalism, in lacking a
discourse of blood bonding and territorial claims. It has not mirrored them
The anti-essentialist choice 617

by becoming an irredentist movement seeking to unify all Yugoslav

Muslims, including those of Sandzak and Kosovo, in a ‘Greater (Muslim)
Bosnia’. It was, rather, based on a communist-led movement from the Tito
period for recognition of a secular ‘people-hood’ for Bosnian Muslims in
the Yugoslav state, only later overlaid by one led by Alija Izetbegovic and
his party for a revived religious identity on whose horizons lies Islam as a
world religion (Malcolm 1994; Bringa 1995). The disproportionate suffering
of Bosnian Muslims at the hands of the other national projects before and
during the war made feelings like those expressed by Nudzejma, feelings of
national belonging, of needing a national name, tolerable to colleagues who
do not necessarily share them.
It seemed to me that the base line of agreement (or hope) in the two
organisations circled around the potential ‘emancipatory moment’ of ethnic
mobilisation described by Pieterse. This moment lies in the fact, he says,
that ultimately ethnic conflict is an affirmation of difference in the name of sameness
- sharing the same aims, claiming the same rights as dominant or rival ethnic
groups. The same aims - self-determination, economic prosperity - which now
manifest as conflict may, when the balance of interethnic power has crystallised at a
point where mutual recognition becomes possible and the benefits of settlement
outweigh those of continued conflict, translate into recognition of the same rights
and a settlement on that basis. (Pieterse 1997: 390)

It was 1996 when Nudzejma spoke at the Mijas workshop. The Bosniak
political structure was still reeling from the war, and parties arguing for
ethnic inclusiveness were still contenders for power. But the nationalist
Party of Democratic Action (SDA) would later consolidate its dominance in
the state and religion would increasingly be used as a definer of national
belonging. Complaints would be heard that non-Muslims were being
marginalised and mixed marriages discouraged. How would the feelings of
Nudzejma and other Medica women about Bosniak identity develop as the
space between nation and state closed up?
In the evaluation of ‘nationalism’ by the women at Mijas, one thing was
common: a gender critique. Among the women (from both countries) who
identified themselves with nationalism there was a clear belief that women
potentially had a different way of ‘doing nationalism’ from the currently
visible and violent way, which they described as masculine.
Rosie, for instance, called herself nationalist, but qualified this by
appealing to that potential ‘settlement around rights’ described by Pieterse
above, but here inclusive not only of minority rights but of women’s rights.
As a feminist I wouldn’t want to see Northern Ireland just being merged with
Southern Ireland. I’d like to see an Ireland where all the different strands of
opinion and political thinking are negotiated, and we come up with a new Ireland
that accommodates women. Nationalism, as well, I think, can be a very male thing.
And I know that in Ireland women don’t fit in with being nationalist, being
nationalistic.
618 Cynthia Cockburn

We saw how Maureen talked about an Irish nationalism that had been
‘influenced by feminism’ among other progressive forces, and she admitted,
‘My idea of nationalism comes from being female. I don’t think men would
think about it this way.’ In her view, national liberation and women’s
liberation are mutually necessary. But she knew enough about the history of
anti-colonial struggle to know that nationalist women have to be prepared
for double militancy, struggling within but also against the movement - for
a national liberation movement but for women’s liberation within it. As
Valentine Moghadam puts it, ‘far from being the automatic concomitant of
national liberation, women’s liberation has been frequently regarded as
inimical to the integrity and identity of the national group’ (Moghadam
1994: 2).
The women (from both Medica and the Network) who were opposed to
nationalism, explained their suspicion not only by reference to the
murderous aggressiveness they had experienced from nationalists, but also
to the way women seem to them to be positioned in essentialist nationalist
discourses. Nira Yuval-Davis has demonstrated how in primordialist
renderings of nation, mobilising myths of common origin and common
destiny, the national community is represented as a natural extension of
family and kinship relations. A ‘natural’ sexual division of labour in the
family is celebrated and reinforced. Womanhood is made the locus of
national honour. And stress is laid on women’s role as mothers, biological
reproducers of the nation and those responsible for its cultural reproduction
(Yuval-Davis 1997). The Medica and Network women had seen this
patriarchalism in practice.
Women in Croatia are encouraged to have a lot of children. If they have only two
children they don’t get any privileges . . . [The nationalists] look on a woman only as
a mother. It’s easy for women to be caught in male politics. Leila.
If a nation honours its women, and a warring nation comes along, women become
part of the land, possessions. Women’s bodies are made war upon. Women become
victims of aggressive nationalism. Raping the woman becomes raping the country. Liz
Yes, it is a way of abusing women for the political purposes of men. Sanela
And, because the more primordialist a given nationalism the more clearly
was it patriarchal, it was possible to feel that women had a potential for
reducing the exclusiveness of national movements, refusing the injunctions
of cultural reproduction.
If mothers have a cosmopolitan democratic spirit they can educate their children in
that, independently of their husband. Or if they are religious they can teach that
other religions have equal value. That it’s a richness there are many religions, but in
a spirit of equality. So women aren’t just powerless living in patriarchy. If we have
the confidence and the courage. Jelena
These organisations then are not only alliances between women who by
name ‘belong’ to different ethno-national collectivities, each with a supposed
The anti-essentialist choice 619

historical grievance against the other or others. They also handle the greater
challenge of allying women who have different relationships to nationalism
itself. They achieve this by implicitly distinguishing between forms and
moments of nationalism, distancing themselves from primordial, patriarchal,
aggressive and exclusive nationalisms. The two projects are thus better
described not as anti-nationalist but as anti-essentialist.
This orientation is expressed clearly in the projects’ habitual treatment of
ethne, religion and culture, as was clear in my earlier research among them.
In both Medica and the Network they acknowledge, with pleasure, different
traditions and cultures. But they avoid fixing any person’s identity in
relation to them. They represent them as fluid, as resources for people,
rather than as fixed, closed, definers of people. They refuse ethnic closure,
waiting to see what a person herself says about her relationship to her
ascribed community, her given ‘name’, her family, the place she was born,
the religious and political authorities that lay claim to her (Cockburn 1998).
They would, I think, endorse Benedict Anderson’s notion that it is only in
so far as ethne or nation exist in the the collective imagination that they
have substance, or indeed that they exist at all (Anderson 1983).

Women working for women: choices of analysis and focus

The gender perspective from which the women view nationalism suggests
that ‘being women’s projects’ may have a bearing on their ability to
negotiate their politicised ethno-national differences. But what kind of a
bearing? A question often asked in and of the two projects is ‘are they
feminist?’ The Women’s Support Network does define itself as a feminist
project. As to individual members, some are happy to use the term, others
feel uncomfortable and want to qualify it. For instance, one woman
described herself to me as ‘a street feminist’, another ‘a working-class
feminist’. Medica too had been defined as a feminist project early in its life,
when German women were still actively in partnership with Bosnian women
in bringing it into being. Subsequently this had been less publicly stressed.
As with the Network, individual women differed on the subject. Jelena saw
herself as feminist and ‘longed for the birth of an international women’s
movement’, while one colleague expressed mistrust of ‘a woman living for
herself’, and another simply said ‘I’m feminist the Bosnian way.’ Closer
questioning showed such differences arose partly from different conceptions
of ‘what feminism is’. Women might feel happy with ‘women’s rights’, for
example, but unhappy with a feminism that fixes women’s identity and
opposes it to that of men.
It was less what women said, however, than what the two projects were
actually doing, their practice, that clarified what feminism meant to them.
What emerged, particularly during the exchange of visits, as central to the
operation of both the Women’s Support Network and Medica Women’s
620 Cynthia Cockburn

Association was a gender analysis of (1) violence and (2) political power. We
saw a good deal of commonality in their thinking, positioning and practice
on these things. As I shall suggest, it defines their position in relation to
feminism, and this in turn enables a reconsideration of the relation
‘feminisdnationalism’.

Violence: n (gendered) continuum

Both Medica and the Women’s Support Network (especially its constituent
women’s community centres) respond to the damage done to women by
violence. They do it in different ways and different circumstances, but there
were enough similarities to make for a valuable exchange of experience.
Women in both projects clearly perceived a continuum of violence stretching
in style from intimate sexual abuse to remote killing by high-tech weapons,
and ranging in space from the home to the battlefield. They saw gender as
an important factor linking different manifestations of violence, affecting
this continuum.
Medica of course by virtue of its work could hardly mistake the
connection between male sexual violence against women and the violence of
national war. The ethnic aggression in Bosnia-Herzegovina, first by Bosnian
Serb nationalists and later by Bosnian Croat nationalists, mainly against
Bosnian Muslims but also against each other, resulted in very large numbers
of dead, wounded and displaced. Possibly 200,000 were killed. Around 2
million became internal or external refugees. And the numbers of women
raped for their supposed ethnicity, sometimes in a way apparently system-
atised by the paramilitary commands, was also very high - probably more
than 10,000. Rape was clearly intended to destroy the morale and threaten
the cultural survival of the enemy people by humiliating its men and defiling
its women - women’s purity being often represented in nationalist discourse
as a nation’s prized possession (Stiglmayer 1995; Seifert 1996).
Medica’s gynaecologists set about treating women’s battered bodies,
terminating unwanted pregnancies, restoring reproductive health - and their
ryychotherapists and nurses looked for ways to help women find the
strength to heal in mind and spirit. In this work they learned that rape was
not the only gendered feature of the violence women suffered. Women and
men were treated differently by the aggressors. Men tended to be
imprisoned, used as forced labour and in many cases executed. Women were
usually held separately, sometimes raped, and later expelled to become the
bulk of the refugees.
With the end of the war, too, Medica’s staff gained a clearer perception
that male violence against women also pervades what is known as ‘peace’.
Men returning from the war were more prone to be violent because of their
experiences in battle, and because of the distance the war had put between
men and women. Their violence was more lethal because they often
The anti-essentialist choice 62 1

possessed weapons. Medica set up an SOS telephone ‘hotline’ for women

suffering violence.
The four women of the Women’s Support Network who visited Zenica,
saw in Medica a resource beyond the dreams of women in Belfast. A refuge
with space for fifty women and children; professionals who had themselves
experienced war, loss and displacement responding to raped women not as
victims but as survivors, as equals; a capacity for simultaneous care of the
body and the mind; a coherent philosophy and training in treating post-
traumatic stress disorder.
In Belfast women were also suffering in a gender-specific way from the
violence of war. The conflict in Northern Ireland has been on a smaller
scale than that in the former Yugoslavia. The country has not known a
cataclysmic genocidal convulsion like that of Bosnia. The dead are estimated
at ‘only’ 3,000 or so. But instead, the stand-off in Northern Ireland between
the British state, the Irish Republican Army and the various Loyalist
paramilitary formations has been exceptionally long-drawn-out, deforming
everyday life and damaging relationships for thirty years.
While they were in Zenica they told some of their stories to Medica’s
therapists. They told how women in Catholic communities had become used
to being routinely arrested, stripped, searched, questioned, held, released.
They told how soldiers blocked their streets and broke down their front
doors. ‘It was a close war. They came to our houses to murder us. We saw
our men killed in front of us.’ Women in Belfast, especially Catholic
women, have known repression by the state, including an army that patrols
housing estates, even school classrooms and hospital wards, and has often
used its guns and CS gas against ordinary people. They have seen their
husbands and sons (and sometimes daughters) imprisoned for years by the
British state, and seen some driven to hunger strike and suicide. They have
known the violence of sectarian assassination by bomb and bullet; and
punishment beatings and shootings by the paramilitaries policing their own
communities. From Medica, the Network women learned for the first time
to think of all this as ‘war’ and of the distress it causes as ‘war trauma’.
The conflict in Northern Ireland is in many ways intimate and local.
Many of the deaths and woundings have occurred on local street corners, in
pubs, on doorsteps. Almost all the violence has been done by men: as
soldiers, police, insurrectionaries, paramilitary vigilantes. To conceptualise it
as being linked to male violence against women is therefore no more
difficult than in Bosnia. While the Bosnian women were just lifting the lid
on the pervasiveness of domestic male violence, the cover had long been off
in Northern Ireland, where, as in Britain, male violence against women and
children is well recognised as endemic. The women’s community centres in
working-class Belfast that the Women’s Support Network represents are
often a first point of contact for women escaping from, or living with,
violent men. They offer women a place to spend the day and find friendship
and support outside the home. Their advice wofkers (usually women users
622 Cynthia Cockburn

who have trained for this work) can offer emergency counselling or give
help with getting pregnancies terminated (abortion is illegal in Northern
Ireland.) The centres are not equipped or staffed for this kind of work in
the way that Medica is. But they work closely with other agencies in
Northern Ireland, and they took their visitors to meet some of these:
Women’s Aid, the Family Planning Association, the Rape Crisis Centre.
The exposure women get through Medica and the Network to the
incidence of sexual violence is a forceful consciousness-raiser. It legitimises a
women-only project: women abused by men clearly need a safe space
provided by women. It brings to view the different positioning of men and
women in relation to violence. True, some women fight. But many more
men than women carry arms and take part in fighting; more men than
women are sexual abusers; more women than men are raped; more women
than men are battered by sexual partners. More importantly, since these
skewed statistics result from men’s societal dominance and authority over
women, it introduces notions of gender power relations and gender
ideologies. The imbalances are perpetuated by cultures in which masculinity,
militarism and force are associated, and in which men assume rights over
women. Women in the projects are led to see a gender dimension in all
forms of violence, including male violence against men, and thus to detect a
continuum linking them.

Political power: women’s exclusion

The second important issue thrown up during the exchange visits was
women’s relationship to the structures and processes of political power.
Both projects held the relationship to be problematic - and important. Their
approaches to it differed, however. This was partly because the political
contexts of Northern Ireland and Bosnia-Herzegovina, while comparable in
some respects today as they undergo post-war reconstruction, derive from
very different pasts.
When Maureen introduced the Women’s Support Network to the
Bosnian women on the first day of their visit to Belfast she did so in terms
that stressed political engagement and advocacy. The Network had been
formed she said ‘as a unified voice to promote the concerns of women in the
communities hardest hit by the conflict, where poverty was worst, where the
political neglect was worst . . .’. The individual centres represented by the
Network might be mainly service providers, but the Network itself, its
central down-town office and staff, exists for activism and campaigning.
The current phase of the conflict in Northern Ireland began in the late
1960s. In 1972 direct rule was imposed by the British parliament,
interrupting half a century of Protestant/Unionist local control. Northern
Ireland constituencies returned members of parliament to Westminster, and
electoral local councils continued to exist. But Republican politicians
boycotted formal politics, and local councils anyway had few powers.
The anti-essentialist choice 623

Representative democracy was thus sorely lacking. The high-profile political

parties in Northern Ireland were, and continue to be, sectarian and focused
upon constitutional issues. Some on both sides are close to paramilitary
formations. Party manifestos have had little to say on social issues of
importance to women, such as poverty, health, housing and education. Men
are overwhelmingly preponderant in party leaderships. There were no
women among Northern Ireland representatives to the British or European
Union parliaments. The political system ignored women and women’s
interests, and ordinary working-class women in Belfast felt intimidated and
alienated by it.
While the women from Medica were in Belfast they were taken meet Mo
Mowlam, the secretary of state for Northern Ireland, at Stormont, the
building that will house the new parliament for Northern Ireland, foreseen
in the Good Friday peace agreement. And they spent some of their time
attending activities of the Women into Politics (WIP) project, a constituent
part of the Network. It was clear that, if peace came, representative politics
would be radically reconstituted in Northern Ireland. But would it serve
women any better? How could they meaningfully participate and make their
voices heard? Women in the various women’s community centres tended to
avoid any mention of party politics. They came into the centres to leave all
that behind them. Besides, party politics was men’s business, and if they
voted at all women would tend to vote as their husbands did.
WIP began a cautious painstaking process of breaking the silence on
politics. First, centre by centre, they organised discussions called ‘Let’s talk
politics.’ In non-threatening spaces, at first in ‘single identity’ groups, they
asked themselves: What is ‘political’ for women? What holds us back from
engaging? What would we want to change? The project gradually brought
women of the two traditionally opposed communities together in Belfast-
wide educationals and discussions. Women helped each other explore their
political needs and their political marginalisation, make a critique of the
masculinity, sectarianism and arrogance of the existing system and explore
ways they might, on their own terms, get themselves and/or their interests
into the political system. They campaigned for inclusiveness and fairness in
politics - in other words for the quality of the peace they wanted to see in
Northern Ireland.
While in Belfast, the Bosnian women listened to the Network women
talking about challenging the local council, lobbying party leaders, putting
pressure on civil servants, bidding up women’s share of peace funding. And
they said ‘You are more political than we are.’ But when the Belfast women
were in Zenica, they spent some of their time in Infoteka, Medica’s
information, public relations and advocacy department. And here they
found women equally concerned about women’s marginality in the post-
Dayton political system. Just as in Northern Ireland, the parties, and their
voters, were aligned around constitutional issues. Nationalist parties on all
three sides dominated the arena. The leading politicians were those who had
624 Cynthia Cockburn

made war: Bosnian Serb nationalists, Bosnian Croat nationalists - and

Izetbegovic’s Bosnian Muslim Party of Democratic Action which appeared
to be abandoning its erstwhile commitment to a multi-ethnic Bosnia. None
of them were challenging the way the Dayton agreement had rendered Serbs
non-constituent minorities in the Muslim-Croat Federation, and Muslims
and Croats non-constituent in the Republika Srpska.
So in Medica, as in the Network, the women felt disenfranchised and
alienated. Unlike the Network, however, they were not as yet openly
fighting the system. Medica had been set up as service provision. They were
aware of needing the cooperation of state agencies - the health service, the
police - in dealing with rape. Besides, they were still learning the skills of
protest and campaigning. There had been no tradition of political critique
and grassroots resistance in Federal Yugoslavia. The League of Communists
had had things much their own way. People, even feminists, had tended to
take for granted what the state offered and what it withheld. Maja Korac
has described the ‘anti-political politics’ of feminists in Federal Yugoslavia:
they had never conceptualised their activism as ‘a potential part of the
sphere of the official politics of the socialist state’ (Korac 1998: 64). So,
now. Radmila said
It’s very important for us. We should encourage women to take bigger and active
roles in politics. Because politics isn’t just talking about borders but many other
issues that concern directly our lives . . . [But] there’s a big reluctance in Bosnian
women and many ordinary people to get involved in politics. Because politics did
what it did. We had the conflict, we had the aggression because of the politics. And
not many of us are likely to go into political issues, because we don’t want to create
new trouble.

But the team in Infoteka, in the very nature of their role in Medica, were
looking outwards to the context of national and local political institutions
and civil society, and noting their patriarchalism. They could see how
drastically women’s political representation had fallen with the loss of the
old Yugoslav 30 per cent female quota system. They could see the generous
social provisions, securities and relative equalities of the old Yugoslav state
being whittled away, with little resistance. They were mobilising for Medica
to have a stronger campaigning role.

What nationalism? what feminism? choice and coherence

The question is often posed: ‘are feminism and nationalism compatible?’ It

meets with divergent responses. Lois West, for instance, boldly titles a book
Feminist Nationalisms and, writing of nationalism in many different
countries and continents, argues that ‘feminism is integral to it’ (West 1997:
xxxii). Valentine Moghadam, citing Kumari Jayawardena’s work (Jayawar-
dena 1986) on national independence movements in eleven Middle Eastern
The anti-essentialist choice 625

and Asian countries earlier in this century, concludes ‘in these cases ...
feminism and nationalism were complementary, compatible and solidaristic’.
She goes on to suggest however that ‘this has clearly changed. Today
feminists and nationalists view each other with suspicion if not hostility . . .’
(Moghadam 1994: 3). By contrast, Gisela Kaplan, from the perspective of a
different continent, writes, ‘feminism and nationalism are almost always
incompatible ideological positions within the European context’ (Kaplan
1997: 3). She finds only mid-nineteenth-century Italy and early twentieth-
century Finland to be exceptions. Does the answer to the question then, as
these accounts suggest, depend purely on the historical and geographical
moment, and the variant of nationalism that flows from it?
In understanding how the Women’s Support Network and Medica
maintain their alliances, I have suggested it is indeed important to
distinguish conceptually (as the organisations implicitly do in practice)
different nationalisms. But the above account of the work of Medica and
the Network suggests it is also important to distinguish different kinds and
moments of feminism - and to locate the two organisations among them.
Analyses of the relationship of nationalism and feminism tend to be more
diligent in deconstructing the former than the latter. There is a tendency to
write of ‘nationalisms’while permitting feminism to remain in the singular. It
is succinct and convenient to speak of ‘the’ feminist paradigm, ‘the’ feminist
critique, and ‘the’ women’s movement in relation to nationalism. But
feminism too has its political variants. There is the familiar triplet of liberal,
radical and socialist feminisms (Beasley 1999). There are dominating and
marginalised feminisms (hooks 1982). Specially significant for the present
purpose, there are essentialist and anti-essentialist or social-constructionist
feminisms. The difference has been well expressed by Diana Fuss.
Essentialism is classically defined as a belief in true essence - that which is most
irreducible, unchanging, and therefore constitutive of a given person or thing . . . In
feminist theory, essentialism ... appeals to a pure or original femininity, a female
essence, outside the boundaries of the social and thereby untainted (though perhaps
repressed) by a patriarchal order. It can also be read in the accounts of universal
female oppression, the assumption of a totalising symbolic system which subjugates
all women everywhere, throughout history and across cultures. (Fuss 1989: 20)
By contrast, social-constructionist feminisms are more cautious in how they
represent women as a collective social actor. Constructionism, says Fuss,
insists that essence is itself a historical construction. Constructionists
demonstrate the way previously assumed self-evident kinds (like ‘man’ or ‘woman’)
are in fact the effects of complicated discursive practices . . . constructionists are
concerned above all with the production and organization of differences, and they
therefore reject the idea that any essential or natural givens precede the processes of
social determination. (Fuss 1989: 20)
The women of the Women’s Support Network and Medica would probably
not identify with extreme versions of constructionism, in which any
626 Cynthia Cockburn

difference between men and women is reduced to the discursive, to become

a matter of mere performance (Butler 1990). They sometimes deploy casual
essentialisms in everyday speech and would most likely agree with Fuss,
who is one of those who believes essentialism has its strategic uses for a
feminist movement. They do deploy ‘women’ as a mobilising device. But as
I have shown, they base this notion of women’s commonality not on
biological or cultural but on political exegesis. Women are seen as sharing
marginalisation and subjection in the violent discourses and practices of the
structures of domination. This is very different from representing women as
an irreducible unity, born mothers, sisters and nurturers, all different from
and all better than men. Images of this latter type, found for example in the
work of Griffin (1984) and Daly (1979), skirt dangerously close to the
primordialist renderings of ethne or nation, whose members too are seen as
an unquestioned unity, essentially alike, different from and better than other
peoples and nations.
Jill Benderly has written of a conflict between these two variants of
feminism in the Yugoslav context.
Feminists in the Yugoslav successor states have split over their understanding of
nationalism and patriotism. Two clusters of feminists in Zagreb worked on the issues
of war-raped women. Croatia sheltered most of the war refugees from its own
republic and from Bosnia-Herzegovina, so it became the most feasible site for work
on this issue. The war severely exacerbated already existing conflicts among the
Zagreb feminist groups. In wartime, the political divisions among Croatian feminists
took on a larger meaning: non-nationalism versus nationalism. (Benderly 1997: 66)

Benderly names four women’s groups. Two were in Croatia - Kareta, a

radical feminist group, and Bedem Ljubavi, or ‘Wall of Love’, an
antimilitarist group mainly of mothers. And two were in Bosnia - Zene
Bosnia-Herzegovina, a Bosnian refugee women’s group, and Biser, known
in English as the International Initiative of Women of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
She writes of them: ‘Their stand as Croatian and Bosnian women is that
rape is a distinctly Serbian weapon for which all Serbs - even feminists who
opposed the war - are culpable. They draw an analogy between nation as
victim and women as victim’ (Benderly 1997: 67)
These groups joined with Franjo Tudjman’s regime in the vilification of
other feminist women, particularly those united in the Zagreb Women’s
Lobby, who took a public stand against Croatian nationalism. Feminists of
this latter group pointed out that, though the scale might differ, in the
Yugoslav wars women of all ethnicities were being raped, and men of all
ethnicities were perpetrating rape. They continued working closely with
Serbian feminists in rump Yugoslavia who were opposed to its Serb
nationalist regime. This added fuel to the smear campaign waged against
them by nationalist media and nationalist feminists, in which they were
portrayed as as ‘witches’ and traitors (Slapsak 1995; Korac 1998).
As Benderly concludes, a feminism that conflates woman-as-victim with
The anti-essentialist choice 627

nation-as-victim walks dangerously close to an essentialist nationalism. And

feminisms that adopt patriarchal discourse, defining women as mothers, run
a similar risk. A movement of ex-Yugoslav women organised as ‘soldiers’
mothers’ developed initially to oppose the involvement of the Yugoslav
Army in fighting on ethnic lines between the constituent parts of the
country. At first this confrontation by women with the male generals
leading the country to war was inspiring to other anti-war feminists
(Hughes et al. 1995). But as the women’s demands failed, the mothers’
movement split on national lines. What ensued in Croatia is indicative.
Croatian women’s concern narrowed to preventing their sons from fighting
others of their own national group. The ‘motherhood’ symbolism was
readily exploited and twisted in the Croatian press for nationalist propa-
ganda (Zarkov 1997).
In the focus of the Network and Medica on gendered violence and on
political power we can see both projects rejecting precisely this definition of
women as victidmother. Instead of celebrating and fixing feminine role and
feminine identity, they critique gender as a power relation. We have seen
how Medica approaches its clients, women who have been raped and
traumatised in other ways, not as victims but as survivors. And in neither
project do they construct each others’ identities according to familial roles
or in familial discourse. Many are in fact mothers, and their families are
important to them (never more so than during a war). But motherhood is
not what an involvement with Medica or the Women’s Support Network
suggests is central to one’s sense of self. They organise collective child care
to give women respite from family roles; they organise vocational training
courses to assist their independence; they help them find an exit from
intolerable marriages. They work, in other words, to help women construct
a totally contrasted woman-self - one that is active, confident, autonomous,
unafraid of the public sphere.
What unites the women of Medica and the Network, whether they call
themselves feminist or not, nationalist or not, is the anti-essentialism of
their gender analysis. Though, as we saw, some of the women at Mijas said
they thought women might tend to ‘do’ nationalism or ethnicity differently
from men, other things they said showed they did not mean to suggest
women are born nurturing, cooperative or non-violent. ‘I don’t believe it’s
only men who support violent nationalism’, Milica said. They remembered
the belligerent nationalist women they knew, citing Margaret Thatcher or
Biljana Plavsic, a leading Bosnian Serb nationalist. And they acknowledged
their own violent and vengeful feelings. Jelena said, ‘I don’t think we’re
totally different human beings from men. I sometimes recognize aggressive-
ness in me . . .’.
Anti-essentialism is also what effects a connection between the organisa-
tional choices to be women-only and to be cross-national alliances. We have
seen how their work has generated perceptions about violence, and
particularly about the connections between different kinds of violence, and
628 Cynthia Cockburn

how it has given them an acute perception of the political exclusion and
marginalisation of women. Seeing these things in a context of essentialist
nationalisms has exposed contradiction at the heart of the gender regime of
the societies they live in. They see ‘value’ placed on women in religious/
nationalist discourse, while endemic male violence against women implies
their worthlessness. They see the hyped importance of women in the family,
and simultaneously how they can be beaten and abused there with impunity.
They see women set up as key actors in the private sphere, while they are
excluded from politics and public life. It is these perceptions that give the
coherence to their political analysis and the cohesion to their relationships.
Rather, then, than pursuing the unanswerable question ‘are feminism and
nationalism naturally opposed, or are they natural allies?, we need to admit
that nationalism and feminism are both plural phenomena. In some of their
variants they are compatible, in others incompatible. The configuration may
be progressive or it may be reactionary. But where a feminist and a
nationalist movement do find grounds to unite in a progressive alliance, a
fierce struggle against patriarchalism within the national movement is
unavoidable.

Notes

1 Originally called the Medica Women’s Therapy Centre, Medica changed its name in 1997 to
reflect a broadening of its activities.
2 The research was carried out by the author from the Department of Sociology, City
University London. We wish to thank the following for funding support: the E. and H. N.
Boyd and J. E. Morland Charitable Trust; the William A. Cadbury Charitable Trust; the
Community Relations Council of Northern Ireland; the Global Fund for Women; Gresham
College; the Lipman-Miliband Trust; the Network for Social Change; the Niwano Peace
Foundation; the Scurrah Wainwright Charity; and Womankind Worldwide.
3 A third organisation, Bat Shalom of northern Israel, also participated in this research.
4 The methodology of the project is described in Cockbum and Mulholland (forthcoming).
5 All the personal names used in this article are pseudonymous.
6 Later that year a similar exchange of visits took place between the Women’s Support
Network and Bat Shalom, in Israel. This is described in ‘Crossing borders: comparing ways of
handling conflictual differences’ in a thematic section of Soundings: Journal of Politics and
Culture (Cockburn and Hunter 1999). that reported the final conference of this research
exercise. The conference, titled Doing Trunsversal Politics: Women’s Activism Across Politicized
Ethnic and National Differences, was held at Gresham College, London, in January 1999.

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