Feminine Peace and Peaceful Femininity: Jean Elshtain’s Problematic Theory of “Problematic” Peace

Abstract

There have been arguments concerning whether femininity is inherently peaceful or peace is in itself feminine. Whereas most radical feminists such as Sara Ruddick and Betty Reardon and anti-militaristic feminists such as Cynthia Enloe advocate the notion of peaceful women, equal rights or liberal feminists such as Barbara Ehrenreich and political realist such as Jean Elshtain reject the idea but with a different reason. Ehrenreich insists women are not peaceful and even war prone in order to prove that men and women are equal in their performances; Elshtain proclaims women can not be pacifists to advocate that war is functionally necessary to the sustenance of the state. Among many theories, however, Elshtain’s political thought related with gender, peace and war is under scrutiny here in this article, in that she has delved into these issues in a sustained and very controversial manner. As an exemplary proponent of political realism and liberal or “neoliberal” feminism in the arena of international relations, Elshtain negates the notion of feminine peace or peaceful femininity by providing examples of various women participating in the war around the world. The political realization that war has always been in the world and will not be “obsolete” makes her say peace is “problematic” and even “sterile,” because it robs a vital and driving force from the people and their history. In her ideal civic state where “purified patriots” do carry “necessary” just war against terror, no place is given therefore for the perpetual peace. Whether women are peaceful, bellicose, peaceful but warring if necessary (Johan Galtung, Christine Sylvester, Jan Pettman, and Dan Smith and Inger Skjelsboek, among others), one thing commonly accepted for all the feminists and IR theorists despite their political differences is that, ultimately “peace is better than war.” Elshtain’s theory of problematic peace, then, turns out to be “problematic” because she claims war has been inevitable as a vital force through which the world is constituted and thus peace, categorically passive and inferior, will politically never be actualized. For Elshtain, war matters, not peace. This article insists however that the notion of “negative peace” should be transcended by not positioning peace opposite to war in the world of nuclear war which in the end nullifies the notion of constituting war itself. A new notion of peace is thus desirable to move away from the outdated notion peace as an absence of war and from the obsolete notion of nuclear catastrophe, a structural and ultimate outcome of negative peace. After one massive nuclear war, there will be no more “deterrent” wars. The awareness that war’s opposite is not peace but ordinariness and “fullness of life”(Panikkar), and that ordinary “full” life is not achieved by war may relieve Elshtain from her relentlessly realistic but nevertheless idealistic conundrum, who is driven with the political notion of “homo homini lupus” and “bellum omnium contra omnes,” which should be negated in the civil society in vain.