Building a Global Feminist Alliance for Peace in East Asia

Abstract

In an era of vacillations between threats of a nuclear war and promises of peace breakthroughs in East Asia, this article takes examples from public campaigns of women’s peace groups—such as Women’s Peace Walk, Women Cross DMZ (the Demilitarized Zone), Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace, and PeaceWomen Across the Globe—and argues for feminist scholarship to take an interdisciplinary approach and, in particular, to fuse peace studies with cultural studies, political economy, and global geopolitics. Doing so requires an examination of the history and the scope of the military-industrial complex, its relationship with finance capital, its bonds with governments and political parties, and its business patterns in relation to wars and conflicts all over the world. It also is crucial to sow the seeds of reconciliation and peace into the daily life of ordinary people. Thus, historians, cultural workers, educationists, writers, and scholar activists of different areas must undertake long-term sustained work for reconciliation and peace at the grassroots level as well as networking at the regional and global levels.