What are the different forms of and approaches to masculinities? What are the risks and potentials associated with working on/with masculinities? How can we ensure the promotion of gender justice in peacebuilding by taking into account masculinities while centring women, LGBTIQ+ people, and other vulnerable communities with diverse needs and concerns?
Incorporating gender as an analytical tool in violence prevention and peacebuilding is vital. At the heart of gender-sensitive conflict prevention is to analyze and address gender as a system of power that is relational. Hence, a gender-transformative approach to peacebuilding provides effective understanding of the power asymmetries and harmful norms that lay the foundation for insecurity and violence. However, what currently prevails is an interpretation of the term gender largely equated with women and conceived from a one-size-fits-all orientation.
swisspeace conducted a new scoping study that explores the relationships between masculinities, violence, and peace. Based on qualitative interviews with various organizations in Lebanon and Tunisia, it aims to provide guidance to inform peace policy by discerning potential avenues and risks with working with/on masculinities and for gender equality in prevention strategies.
Against the severe polarization and crackdown in Lebanon and Tunisia, feminist and women’s-led networks and civil society organizations (CSOs) have been the backbone of peace- and state-building efforts. From this vantage point, they have played a central role in mediation and providing protection and humanitarian support to vulnerable communities to fill the gaps in service provision.
Very importantly, Lebanese and Tunisian CSOs operating at the local, national, and regional levels have pushed to tackle the root causes and impacts of the crisis on women’s, men’s, and gender minorities’ experiences by addressing harmful social norms, values, and structures. This includes the environment where expected roles and practices of men are closely tied to dominant traditional beliefs related to hegemonic masculinity and where many men view militarized attitudes as a viable path for a living. Men are expected to be the providers, the breadwinners, the gatekeepers, and the protectors of the family, community, and larger society.
Above all, these roles are maintained as a significant practice for subjugating women’s lives and bodies and reinforcing men’s power and control, including over resources. Some partner organizations echoed that these dominant ideal expectations of men are enshrined in social structures (e.g., the household, political parties, religious institutions, and legislation), which fuel drivers of conflict. These structures and militarization reassert the ideal man as a combatant and normalize the general use of force and enactment of political power to perpetrate different forms of violence and dominance. And yet, some men may subscribe to other forms of masculinities. While these are perceived as failing to conform to dominant practices, they are relegated to subordinate masculinity and get sanctioned for breaking with traditional expectations.
The study spotlights a gender-transformative approach to conflict prevention to explain complex drivers of violence based on local concerns. It recognizes that masculinities are multiple, complex, context-specific, and sometimes even contradictory. Accounts of masculinities and how they interact in fragile and conflict-affected contexts encompass opportunities and tensions in elevating feminist peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction. Most importantly, integrating a gender-transformative approach to conflict prevention, including masculinities, primes agencies, organizations, and practitioners to provide an accountability mechanism, effectively conceptualize programming, better adapt to rapid conflict dynamics changes, recognize early warning signals, and by doing so, mitigate fragility drivers and harm.
Find out more in the swisspeace’s research ‚Masculinities, Violence and Peace‘, which will be published by the beginning of November 2022.
