This is a conversation with Marie E. Berry and Milli Lake, co-founders and principal investigators of the Women’s Rights After War Project. We primarily spoke about their article “on inconvenient findings” and their paper for Annual Reviews “women’s rights after war: on gender interventions and enduring hierarchies”

Dr. Berry is Associate Professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and a member of Bridging the Gap’s current International Policy Summer Institute cohort. Dr. Lake is Associate Professor in the International Relations Department at the London School of Economics and a co-founder of the Advancing Research on Conflict Consortium.

Topics Discussed:

• The limitations of many ‘women’s empowerment’ programs
• What happens when research findings challenge the work that policy makers are invested in promoting? Example of degrowth and economics
• Who gets excluded when certain interests (such as class) are maintained?
• Examples of Rwanda, Bosnia and Lebanon
• Narrowly-defined arena for justice
• The three Dayton agreements (referencing the episode with Aida Hozic) and ongoing situation in Bosnia and Serbia
• War logics in ‘postwar’ contexts
• The USA as a ‘postwar’ country
• Should we make inconvenient findings less inconvenient?
• The idea of nation states
• The role of futurism and speculative movements

Resources Mentioned:

• On inconvenient findings
• 69/ The Entrenched “Manliness” of Ethnic Power-sharing Peace Agreements (with Aida A. Hozić)

Recommended Books:

• Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
• Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
• The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow
• Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by adrienne maree brown
• Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by adrienne maree brown
• Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation by adrienne maree brown
• On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint by Maggie Nelson
• Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

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Transcript prepared by Antidote Zine:

We know that change comes from the streets, the peripheries. It never comes from those who are invested in reinforcing the status quo. It isn’t for us, from where we are sitting, to lay out what a pathway to change or transformation should look like. Instead we should think more creatively about the values that we wish to center in a more peaceful and free world.

Marie E. Berry:  My name is Marie Berry; I am a feminist researcher and writer, and I am calling in today from Denver, Colorado.

Milli Lake: Thanks Marie, thanks Elia, my name’s Milli Lake, also a feminist researcher and writer, calling in from London, and I teach classes at the London School of Economics.

Elia J. Ayoub: Thanks a lot for doing this. We’ll primarily be talking about a paper you two co-wrote, and then we’ll probably take it somewhere else.

You wrote this paper and an associated blog post about Women’s Rights After War (WRAW), a project that you’re involved in. To start us off, can you talk a bit about the project and what the paper is about?

MB: Milli and I dreamed up this project years ago, while we were both graduate students doing our dissertation fieldwork in different places. We were meeting in central Africa; in Rwanda is where we met. The origins of the project were really in conversations that we had with each other about what we saw going on in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on the efforts to “empower” women in these places, especially in the judicial, legal, and political arena in Rwanda. 

We noticed that there was a real celebration, back in 2011-2012, of the Rwandan example as a model for other countries around the world, because Rwanda has had the world’s highest level of women in parliament for decades. Less than ten years after the end of its brutal genocide in 1994, Rwanda elected the world’s highest level of women to parliament, and soon surpassed that with a majority, and today has sixty-two percent women in its national legislature. And yet what we were seeing, and what we saw so often, was the really limited way in which that news headline actually played out in the day-to-day lives of women who we were meeting and working with. 

So we started trying to ask the question: Who benefits from “women’s empowerment” programs and statistics? Which women benefit? Are women even actually the real beneficiaries of these projects to increase the levels of women in these formal institutions? Or is it a case, in the Rwandan case at least, where it is the regime that’s the main beneficiary? Because it’s had an ability to generate international recognition; the president Paul Kagame [in power since 2000] has won numerous awards. There’s been a celebration among aid donors that there is a really strong commitment towards women’s empowerment in Rwanda, and yet for ordinary women we saw so many limitations for this. 

Milli can say more, but the origins of the Women’s Rights After War project was to ask this question in other places around the globe, emerging from armed conflict, where there had been a concerted effort on the part of both the government and the international community to try and put women into these positions of political power as a way of building a more liberal, durable peace. It’s this idea that if we get women into the government, if we get women at the peace table, perhaps if we even include women in the military and the police, we will build these more gender-sensitive societies, which is part of building a more robust, durable, liberal democracy. 

Our starting point was very skeptical of this, and indeed throughout the work that we’ve done with the project, research not just in Rwanda but also Colombia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Iraq, and Bosnia, we’ve been trying to understand the dynamics of this “women’s empowerment” rhetoric and interventions to see who it really is, at the end of the day, who is benefiting from the inclusion of women in these spaces.

We have a lot to say about what we found. We found some really remarkable stories of incredible, inspiring women who are in the government or political system of these places, and yet we are deeply skeptical of the lack of attention towards systems like class when we’re talking about who benefits and which women benefit from these programs.

Milli, maybe you could describe a bit about the project and what the dreams were.

ML: I’ll just add to that; as Marie has just described, the motivating case, the country where we first met, Rwanda, was a very stark example of how the inclusion of some women from particular ethnic, linguistic, or class backgrounds can serve the goals of gender equality without feminist priorities and objectives, and the goals of equality and peace conceived of more expansively or holistically, because there is the elevation of certain women to the detriment of women from more marginalized backgrounds.

While that served as a motivating case for us, it prompted a much broader set of questions across a number of transitional postwar contexts that ended up forming the basis of our project, but also allowed us to think a bit more expansively about the way that moments of crisis or transition or rupture, critical junctures, create these opportunities for certain reform efforts to be capitalized on, and allow the pursuit of single-axis goals, but that when we don’t think expansively about who benefits, as Marie just described, then we miss the ways women from different background continue to be under-served by these reform efforts.

One of the major goals of the project was to think about how class-based inequalities, ethnic inequalities, and race-based inequalities, are reproduced by “gender inclusionary” policy, and also to think about the broader structures of colonial and imperial violence (and other forms of violence) that have manifested historically in a number of the countries that we have been looking at, and to think about how some of those fissures are also similarly reproduced by the inclusion of women from very particular backgrounds of existing privilege who are dominant in a postwar settlement.

While those served as the guiding research questions for the project, we also wanted to build a research team that allowed us to think more expansively about what a more just and inclusive and emancipatory peace looks and feels like. We have been fortunate to work with a phenomenal team of researchers, particularly Sinduja and Soraya, our project managers, who have been working with us for three years now to think about both the research goals of the project as well as other ways that we can challenge existing structures of oppression and domination, and think about how we can realize and practice some of the politics that undergird the project in our work and research and collaborations.

MB: As Milli pointed out, the project had two goals. One was the set of research questions that we outlined, around who benefits from “women’s empowerment” reforms, and which women in particular, and the second goal, as Milli highlighted, was to think a bit more radically about how to convene a feminist research team in the twenty-first century academy, and think about what outputs we actually valued.

We are so conditioned to see authoritative knowledge anointed as only the written word: it’s an article that gets published and cited, and that becomes the currency of the academic enterprise, and what we were seeing, especially as we were interacting with movements and communities around the globe that we were privileged and fortunate to be able to connect with throughout this research, is that so much of the complexity and nuance of people’s lives gets lost in the reduction to the written word. So we’ve been thinking about how to produce knowledge that is more creative, that uses different mediums, that uses arts-based methods, and oral stories and things like that, so as to think within our own small research collective what we might offer to the greater discipline that in some ways pushes back against the “anointing” of the obscure written word behind a paywall, which is what most academic articles get published as, as the thing that captures “objective truth,” or any valid theoretical insights.

That’s been a secondary priority for us, and we just had a wonderful workshop with our team where we could get creative and use different mediums, and we created collages that represented a lot of the findings and themes we were talking about. The whole point of the workshop was to think more boldly and creatively about how we represent the core stories in the project.

EA: Thanks for that. One of the things that caught my attention in your work is that you ask this question, an evergreen question cutting across multiple fields: What happens when research findings challenge the work that policy makers are invested in promoting?

When I was reading it, I thought of something that might seem completely different: the topic of degrowth in economic circles. It’s still taboo to bring it up. Although it’s fundamentally an economics topic, you’re more likely to find it in climate science-related papers. Anecdotally, I know of a prominent degrowth researcher who did his PhD in economics, and he has  been invited a hundred different places (municipalities, NGOs), and not a single economics department has invited him. This is something I’ve seen as a pretty common problem, because it challenges fundamental assumptions that we’re supposed to have about economic growth, capitalism, and neoliberalism.

Can you talk about that question in your respective areas? How have you engaged with it, and what are the “inconvenient findings”?

MB: That question hits on so many of the things that Milli and I and our team talk about all the time, which is also rooted in the fact that we’re both in disciplines (I’m a sociologist; Milli is a political scientist; I am a professor at a policy school) where there is a real push to do research that’s “policy-relevant,” that can be adopted quickly. There’s a streamlined uptake towards changing policy by government actors or NGOs or whatever it is. And in some ways this is a really refreshing and important shift from some of the academic research of the past that is a bit more out of touch with pressing questions related to people’s lives. 

At the same time, we find so often that the pressure to design research projects that will speak to policy questions sometimes can really narrow the radical, old, imaginative questions that academics are well-positioned to think about and ask. One of the things that comes up for us is that in a lot of our publications we’re speaking to champions of women’s rights, like advocates of the Women, Peace, and Security [WPS] agenda (which is the project over the last twenty-plus years started at the the United Nations with UN Resolution 1325 and a series of subsequent resolutions), which really aims to foreground women in transitions from insecurity to security and to think about gender and women’s inclusion in contexts that are emerging from armed conflict.

At the same time, that’s just one aspect of the broader conversation around the importance of women’s empowerment and women’s rights. What we find is that oftentimes, when we are talking about the importance of women’s empowerment and women’s inclusion in these spaces, there is an audience that wants to make sure that this entire architecture of advocacy, and programmatic interventions that are focused on women, is able to continue to grow and to become more robust. 

Our findings suggest that the narrow focus on women’s inclusion and women’s empowerment neglects questions of class and race and caste, and many other categories and axes of difference. 

ML: To tap in on that point, there’s a real desire, especially among people embedded in policy-practitioner spaces, to celebrate the gains that have been made. And there have been tremendous gains in the arena of gender equality and women’s rights in post-war spaces. There is a celebration of those gains that can sometimes perceive critiques of the broader structural challenges and constraints that exist as attacks on the gains that have been made. 

But one of the things we have faced in this research, and without wishing to undermine the work of amazing gender activists and advocates of women’s rights who have worked so hard to ensure access and inclusion and equality in various different political-economic spaces, is that what we call the “single-access” focus on gender and women’s inclusion can reinforce and entrench other hierarchies of oppression if we are not also sensitive to the ways ethnic-, class-, caste- or race-based inequalities are reproduced, and political conflict fissures in postwar spaces are obscured or invisibilised to incorporate women into existing structures of power.

That’s one thing that we butt up against all the time: trying to strike the balance between celebrating the gains of activists who have been fighting on the ground for rights and inclusion and access (and the policy architectures that have supported those efforts) while on the other side existing within massive research institutions and being beholden to grant funding, research incentive structures, and promotion and tenure criteria that serve to de-radicalize at every stage of the process.

In addition to the “inconvenience” of some of our findings, we also have the inconvenience that many scholars and researchers within the academy face and are rightly held accountable for by activists: that all the incentive structures within our disciplines, fields, and institutions are set up to dampen and quash challenges to existing status-quo hierarchies of power. One of the things that Marie and I have both struggled with but also really appreciate the opportunity to take on and think more deeply and critically about is how we can straddle that, how we can work within these institutions without de-radicalizing and softening and dampening the work we consider important.

MB: That’s exactly right. Just to make it really concrete: what we’re talking about when we say “single-access advocacy” and the limits of that is that we see so often the celebration of “women’s inclusion into politics” without recognizing that some of the women in politics are representing interests related to capital, interests related to particular ethno-racial cleavages or dominance, colonial legacies that have anointed particular groups and maintained the dominance of those groups. Many women in politics also embody hyper-patriarchal legacies, often because of their connections and ties to powerful men (husbands, fathers etc.), and what we have been calling for and what we’ve been trying to highlight is that the inclusion of women into systems that are creating oppression is not going to lessen the oppression those systems are creating. Police and military are the perfect example: the inclusion of women into the police is not going to soften the inherent violence of police as a source of insecurity in many people’s lives. 

Something else we talk a lot about in the WRAW project is the difference between spectacular and non-spectacular violence, and the way so much of the advocacy around women’s rights and women’s advocacy, and around peace agreements and building more robust liberal democracies in general, focuses on attention towards spectacular violence. By that we are talking about war violence, violence that looks like bullets and guns and people in the streets, rather than the insidious violence of patriarchy, of the brutalities of inequality as a result of capitalism, of the slow erosion of our climate and the seeping toxicity in waters and soils that creates harm to people’s bodies. 

What we see so often is that policy-relevant research is focused on spectacular manifestations of violence, addressing particular types of violence and the fallout of particular types of violence, rather than on the much more holistic systems that create so much harm in people’s bodies and families and communities. One of the points we’ve been trying to make, pushing back against some of this pressure to make all of your results relevant to certain policy actors, is to say that we need to think more holistically and sometimes our findings are not neat and the do not direct themselves to a particular NGO or a particular member of congress to change policy. It’s about unraveling these systems that are creating so much harm in the first place.

When we start to tackling and unraveling legacies of imperialism and the dominance of capitalism, we get much more messy. And messiness is less conducive to the neatness that’s required for policy relevance. That’s where this conversation tends to go.

EA: When you talk about which women get in power in many contexts, in Lebanon, with the exception of a single woman I can think of, the only women who have gotten into parliament have been either the wives or widows or sisters of powerful men. It’s like inheriting a family legacy, or a business. In the case of Lebanon it’s a lot of oligarchs and warlords.

I first learned about your work through Aida A Hozić’s work. She had written a piece on the Dayton Agreement in Bosnia, and WPS at the UN, and this concept of what she calls the “entrenched manliness of ethnic power-sharing agreements.” Since I’m from Lebanon and she’s from Bosnia, we had an entire conversation about the differences and similarities between those two contexts.

Referencing what’s been happening lately (we’re recording this on 14 January 2022), how would you say the “entrenched manliness” of those power-sharing agreements confirm what you call “narrowly-defined arenas for justice”?

MB: Absolutely. Aida’s work is incredibly valuable in this area. It highlights the limits of these highly institutionalized efforts to bring about profound social change, like the Dayton Accords. In that conversation with you, she spoke about how there were three Daytons. There was the Dayton of international community that was the source of major celebration when it came to thinking about the role of the West, the human rights regime, and NATO in building a more “liberal” twenty-first century and celebrating the United States’ role in mediating the end of conflict and war. There was a huge farce there. Dayton didn’t really stop the war. It stopped the bullets from flying; it got the military part of the war to cease; but the war continues to play out through insidious politics and through an exceptionally and structurally violent inequality and separation that we see increasing.

Just this week as we’re recording, this became more stark: there was a formerly banned celebration of Bosnian Serbs on a day celebrating an ethno-nationalist project of Serb separation that has deeply disturbing implications for the durability of a unified Bosnia and for peace.

The second Dayton was the Dayton of political elites in Bosnia, which is really the people who came to the table. It was the champions of war who were rewarded with the ability to divvy up the country in ways that served their political constituencies and their political agendas, and this has resulted in deep corruption; the ties between political elites and capital and illicit economies is very robust in Bosnia; the second Dayton created an unworkable political system where reform from below was impossible. 

The third Dayton she talks about is the Dayton experienced by ordinary Bosnians. This is were there is real synergy with what Milli and I were just talking about. We find that the technocratic or institutionalized solutions to armed conflict that become the center of the conversation about transitions from war to peace oftentimes fail to dismantle the underlying systems that are responsible for creating the grievances that led to the war in the first place. 

Dayton codified those underlying and deeply-rooted economic, political, and social grievances. They were not resolved, or even softened as a result of the Dayton Accords. In fact they were hardened and deepened. When we think about that system as a “peace agreement,” this is an indictment of the concept of “peace.” It was not about peace. It was about preserving particular interests and the status quo, and wreaking havoc on the well-being of most Bosnians. Think back on Galtung’s conversation about a “negative” versus a “positive” peace: this created and cemented the most negative peace possible, one in which people not only face continued dispossession and separation from their neighbors and countrypeople but one that has led to even more disillusionment with the project of a unified Bosnia. 

It’s a deeply depressing, disturbing, and infuriating thing for many observers today, and certainly many Bosnians.

What the conversation about “entrenched manliness” really highlights is the way these interventions can so often neglect those underlying systems of patriarchy, of class, of imperial legacies; these systems which are really responsible for the conflict in the first place; and instead they can in fact entrench them.

ML: We see this in all of our cases. This is a theme we had observed anecdotally way back before we had conceived of this project, in our early dissertation research, and suspected that it would play out differently in a variety of different political contexts, different postwar settlements. It’s been both astounding and disappointing, and unsurprising, to see how profoundly those patterns that Marie just described in Bosnia echo in every single one of our cases.

Nepal and Colombia are the two cases we’ve been focusing on most recently as cases of power-sharing in the aftermath of war (rather than the dominance of one particular party), and we see that armed groups in many of contexts we study converted into political parties in the aftermath of the postwar settlements, and then war logics and animosities and grievances are reproduced through the inclusion and entry of women into politics, and which women are selected to pioneer and advocate for the goals of particular armed-group-turned-political-parties or the agendas of particular factions from the war.

So there are conflict-era grievances playing out in multiple arenas and forms, and political and economic spaces, well into the period of peace, and they are sanitized through the guise or the ideology of gendered emancipation or gender equality and inclusion. One of the patterns or ideas that we keep coming back to is the way women can be ardent advocates of both patriarchal and ethno-nationalist politics: we see women taking on these roles in Colombia, in Nepal, in Sri Lanka, in Rwanda, in all of the countries that we study. And indeed here in the UK and in the US, of course.

MB: To ground Milli’s examples: when we say we see women representing particular interests, we were in a department in Colombia right before the pandemic started, in February 2020, and we were meeting with women activists and with people in politics and with journalists and others, and in this one particular area three women had just been elected to the local assembly; of those three women, one of them was a remarkable activist. She was rooted in communities; had a long history of doing important work for her community, of advocating for issues related to women’s well-being, health, Indigenous rights. This woman was representing that history while she was in the local assembly.

The other two women were tied to powerful political families that were invested in businesses related to mining and extraction that were responsible for some of the conflict. And especially with the dynamics between the guerillas, the FARC, and the paramilitaries which were defending these mining and other ventures, these women had entered politics and were not representing the interests of women but were absolutely representing the interests of these family businesses that were bound up with the conflict.

It was just one of those examples that was clearly about what we’re talking about. It’s not so abstract. In the United States, we can think of people like Sarah Palin, or Lauren Bobert from Colorado. These are women who are representing extremely difficult proto-fascist political agendas, and certainly not advancing broader feminist commitments.

EA: One thing that Aida and I really had in common (I mentioned there were similarities and differences): the agreement that happened in Lebanon, which happened before the Dayton Agreement, in ’89-90, was written by the agents of war becoming the agents of peace. They know this, and prominent politicians today regularly remind us of this. They are either ex- or current warlords in Lebanon. In 2019 there was a big uprising in Lebanon, and a lot of the major politicians in government were always saying that they were worried: Be careful or else it could be civil war.

But of course they are the only ones who can enact a civil war. They are the ones with the guns, with the organized militias. The protesters were not. But they were effectively threatening us (I was among the protesters) without doing so directly. Other times it wasn’t as subtle. There were direct threats as well, including one assassination last year. That’s a different conversation.

In this conversation about the de facto “agents of peace,” though, you effectively don’t have a choice. As a civil-society person, as an activist, even as an ordinary civilian who is not particularly political: whether you want it or not, this is the new reality now. This new reality may have been established before you were born. In the case of Lebanon, the Taif Agreement is basically an international agreement; all of the major powers either directly or indirectly said this is how the situation is going to be. As with all of those cases of “postwar conflicts,” women were always the ones who were left out.

The quintessential example in Lebanon (as indeed in Argentina and in Bosnia and in many other cases) were mothers and wives and sisters of those who were called “the disappeared.” In Argentina they are called “las madres,” the mothers. In Lebanon it’s the same thing. The vast majority of those who were forcibly disappeared were men “of fighting age,” as they would say, so a lot of those who were campaigning for the truth in the “postwar” era were their female relatives, usually. So this became highly gendered, as war always is, of course. 

The relatives of those who were forcibly disappeared during the Lebanese civil war were effectively told by the government to just forget about them, and to declare them legally dead. The government did their own estimates of how many people were forcibly disappeared, and it’s a much lower number than what those women are saying. There are more women who say they have a male relative disappeared than there are officially “disappeared” men according to the Lebanese government.

Part of my research is to call into question the concept of a “postwar.” It is considered a success story because effectively the men with guns agreed to stop shooting one another. But the territories that they had won, and the reshuffling of power compared to the prewar era, was all consolidated. And it was all portrayed and packaged in this neoliberal framework: We’re going to rebuild Beirut and get all those outside investments. Now an entire part of the city has been privatized and is effectively a ghost town (even before the explosion of 2020, I should say).

One thing I do is focus on the stories of the forcibly disappeared, and through their lived experiences (I’ve interviewed a number of their relatives), I then call into question what we mean by “postwar.” What do we mean by “post”? Who is moving on? Who is benefiting from this “peace”? 

MB: That hits home with everything we’ve been talking and thinking about. When I mentioned the focus that we’ve had on troubling the distinction between spectacular and non-spectacular violence, the same holds for troubling the distinction between prewar, war, and postwar periods. Because ultimately the same structures and systems that are causing the physical, extreme violence during “war” are not actually dismantled by a peace agreement. The same fissures remain, whether it’s ethno-racial fissures or massive inequality, which is so often at the core of conflict…

ML: Or the everyday violence perpetrated by security agents…

MB: Or by patriarchy and the insidiousness of the insecurity women feel not only because of an opposing army, but because of partners, members of their community, family, extended family, or police. These forms of patriarchal violence stretch far before and far after the acute periods of war. 

ML: One of the things we want to emphasize when we’re troubling this distinction between spectacular and non-spectacular forms and manifestations of violence, when we talk to women activists in the various different localities in the countries that we’ve been doing research in: almost always when we ask women about the most profound or biggest challenges they face in their lives and the most pressing forms of violence they face, these are everyday manifestations of the much larger structural systems of oppression. One thing we’ve been thinking more about recently in the project is the way it’s not just the war cleavages and fissures that are carried on into the postwar, and the insidious everyday forms of violence that are carried on, but also really historicizing that violence and thinking about the ways that colonial legacies and legacies of capitalism and globalization have served to shore up those forms of violence and render the conditions for those forms of violence both possible and almost inevitable.

By putting the band-aid on some of these spectacular and more visible forms of violence with peace agreements and bringing women into inclusive security sectors, none of those underlying structures and systems of oppression are addressed, and they continue to wreak pain and suffering on women, predominately from ethnic, racial, and class backgrounds that are the most disenfranchised and under-served by those systems.

MB: And it goes far beyond women. It’s women, but it’s the majority of people who are living in these robustly unequal societies.

ML: Absolutely. But when we think about furthering the goals of gender equality, it becomes really important to recognize that the majority of women are also not served by single-access inclusion. Although the conversation about women’s rights is the main piece of our project, one of the things we’re trying to do is challenge the way that discourse is centered on exclusion and powerful, persisting inequalities.

MB: If I could add to what you were mentioning, Elia, about the disappeared: this is deeply unaddressed in our current frameworks. In all of the places we have done work, this question of whether or not there is any real possibility for “peace” when there is such an unaddressed and unacknowledged lack of knowledge, lack of answers, lack of essential truth about where loved ones are, where loved ones’ bodies are—I’ve met with women in Bosnia who had every opportunity to testify at the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia; they’ve had every opportunity to receive small forms of reparation and things like that; but those don’t matter at all because they are still missing their sons’ bones.

There is no peace, there is no end to the searching; there is no sense of peace that is possible until there is knowledge about where their child is. I’ve been struck repeatedly by these stories in other places. In Sri Lanka, a similar situation happened just last year, where there was this declaration that all the people who were missing are actually dead and that we can close the book on it. But there is no closed book on the loss of your loved ones. There can’t be a closing of that book.

Without thinking about what justice looks like in a much more holistic, reparative framework, these questions of these deep pains that affect so many different places around disappearance really thwart the building of a truly “postwar” period, because there is this persistent violence that’s done, often by the state, by depriving information from people who are missing loved ones.

EA: I also look at “postwar” cinema in Lebanon, and one common theme that we see repeated time and time again is the concept of “hauntings,” hauntings from the past. There’s one film where that haunting is literally a father who was forcibly disappeared; he is the “haunting” in that story. And other times it’s more structural haunting, one might call it. A lot of the battles happened in Beirut; and Beirut’s “postwar reconstruction” was literally done over mass graves. We literally know of certain sites in Beirut—and it’s not that big a city; it’s not that difficult to find the ones that were built over. In one place there is a hotel, in other places some residential buildings. And in those places, under them are the bones of people who as far as the government is concerned are officially dead.

They are of course dead, the bones are there, but we don’t know who they are. And we don’t know if there could be people who were forcibly disappeared in Syria, from the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, or in Israel for that matter. All of those examples are why I am re-questioning this concept of “postwar,” specifically the “post” part. This concept of a “postwar,” what it is erasing? How much of it is still going on?

One easy example in Lebanon is that we have had wars in the “postwar:” in 2006 between Israel and Hezbollah; everything that happened before and since, regular assassinations, not a single one of which would get any kind of accountability. So instead of a postwar, it just becomes a “not-war,” as I’m calling it. It’s defined by the absence of immediate violence.

MB: I totally agree, Elia. I remember a conversation with Milli years ago where she came to the United States for the very first time from London, for her PhD, and maybe I’m putting words in your mouth, Milli, but you were surprised that people don’t consider the United States a postwar country. In political science, we have this attitude: We look over there; that country is postwar, but don’t mind the fact that the United States was built on a system of enslaved labor and the genocide of Indigenous communities. How do we not consider the United States—we are not “post.”

Our current social reckoning around massive racial injustice and around the dispossession of Indigenous communities—these are current political conversations that are rooted in histories over the last several hundred years, that have not been reckoned with, that have not been repaired, that have not been centered in our political discourse. Instead there’s this idea that it’s “past.” But it’s absolutely not past. It’s absolutely present in the ways our inequality operates and plays out in this country. 

ML: It calls to mind the complete shockingness, really, of the ways so many of our findings in political science and conflict studies are rooted on this idea of the signing of the peace agreement and whether or not fighting has re-emerged within five years subsequently. This completely de-historicizes and de-contextualizes the ways violence manifests and the underlying relationships and dynamics of power that foment these repeated insurgencies and other forms of structural and racialized capitalist violence.

The example you just used, Marie, is perfect, but we see this over and over again, and we see it invisibilised and overlooked over and over again in the way the dominant scholarship in these fields conceives of war and defines war in the first place.

MB: I spent the last few days in northern New Mexico, which has a really interesting and very different history, in terms of the Spanish dominance, than Colorado where I am based most of the time. I went to an exhibit yesterday at Fort Garland, which was a military outpost created in very southern Colorado to basically ensure that white settlers were able to come to this free territory and to keep the Ute Indians in check. It was an absolutely brilliant exhibit at the historical museum in Fort Garland that pictured the historical record of the names of these Native American children and women in particular who were enslaved by white settlers in Colorado and New Mexico territories, including those who were enslaved by people like Kit Carson—a name that in Colorado and New Mexico is everywhere: Carson National Forest, roads named after Kit Carson.

I learned yesterday that Kit Carson had an Indigenous child who he bought to raise in his household, but the assumption was that this person was raised doing additional domestic tasks and was not treated as one of the other children but was instead purchased from his home. The enslavement of Native American people is not something that I ever learned about in history textbooks growing up, and it reminds you that this entire country was built on these original sins of settler colonialism.

Just learning a slight bit about my own regional history here in Colorado is a nice way of checking this idea that there is a clear period of atrocities that happens and then is over. Instead it’s built into the very fabric of the institutions that continue to govern. Whether it’s the naming of placing, or the way we have certain infrastructure and resources in some parts of the country and not in others. So much of this was shaped by that period of settler-colonial oppression and enslavement, which I did not know much about, truly, until this exhibit.

EA: This reminds me: I was on a podcast called It Could Happen Here a couple of months ago, and something I mentioned was that the main difference for me as someone from Lebanon is that the “It” has already happened. The reference is to a really bad, apocalyptic thing, like a civil war that could happen in America. It made me think of a forum I took part in where people were asking Which year do you think could be the year we reach a tipping point? They were talking about climate change specifically. And an Indigenous person mentioned 1492 as the year of the tipping point for his family and his people.

And I could remember myself having an Oh moment, a light bulb over my head. We were talking in this context about something really bad that is going to happen, and the “something” is singular to simplify how we were thinking in this mental experiment. But at the end of the day, those collapses or what we call apocalypse, isn’t a one-day or overnight thing. It’s very slow. It’s more akin to a crumbling rather than a collapse, and the first five episodes of the new season of It Could Happen Here call it “The Crumbles.”

But this is something that’s been on my mind a lot, and part of the reason I wanted to talk to you two, because one of the underlying things I’m trying to explore is how one makes inconvenient findings less inconvenient. Is it just a matter of communication? Is it a matter of pressure from the street? Is it both? How do you deal with that question?

MB: You don’t. There’s a reason why they’re inconvenient. They challenge existing systems and structures. They rub up against the status quo, and the status quo is not tenable. That’s what we know, especially when we’re talking about the crumblings of an apocalypse. We are in the midst of mass extinctions; the rising temperatures that are creating cataclysmic weather events around the world; the erosion of soil, of plant life and animal life from so many parts of the world: we are already there. 

Being convenient is being palatable and operating within existing systems, and the existing systems are what require change. Milli and I talk about this a lot, the idea that we are lamenting the way politics—think about the state system as a very concrete thing. The idea of states: we are in a world where we take states as inevitable. But they are not inevitable. They are relatively recent creations. The work of Harsha Walia and others talks about the formation of borders as institutions of violence, that what we need to do is move away from borders, to move away from states, to thinking more locally and at the community level. Because the borders that are required to police state boundaries are one more facet of profound violence that operates continually in terms of protecting certain countries from population flows that are largely flowing as a result of the policies of those countries that are solidifying and formalizing and hardening or militarizing their borders.

Thinking about states as one example, when we say we need to change everything, we really need to change everything. That becomes really scary—and people say, You’re talking about burning it all down. What Milli and I always come back to is that this is not actually the framework. Acknowledging that we are living in an apocalyptic scenario does not mean that we have to burn everything to the ground. Acknowledging that all of these women’s rights reforms and these liberal democratic initiatives more generally are inadequate and failing to erode these underlying systems does not mean we need to light democracy on fire.

That’s not what we’re saying. What we’re saying is there’s a greater need for imagination of how we might structure our relationships—with each other, with the natural world, with different forms of leadership—in ways that are less oppressive and less hierarchical. And there are myriad examples of ways people have been doing this. When we say we must continue to be inconvenient because convenience reifies these systems, what we mean is that we should be inconvenient in pointing out and trying to bring from periphery to center those experiments and ways of living and leading and loving that oftentimes are not dominant.

They are rooted in communities of the subaltern, they are rooted in the periphery.

ML: I also wanted to make the point that we are in a really interesting moment right now. Marie’s and my work has primarily been about war, but many of the structures of violence that we are calling attention to in our work are obviously not just present in conflict- and war-affected settings. All of the countries in which we live are affected by violence and the same kinds of inequalities, albeit in slightly different ways and manifestations. So as well as troubling the war/nor-war or war/postwar distinction, we are also troubling it spacially and geographically as well.

What the current COVID pandemic moment and also the climate crisis are revealing is that we see similar opportunity structures potentially opening that we see in periods of major transition or the signing of peace agreements. Not to the same extent, but we see the language of crisis and rupture being leveraged. The pandemic in particular, especially in liberal democracies and industrialized economies, has really created a bit of a reckoning, and a recognition that these systems, the current systems that we take for granted, are not serving most people—and this isn’t necessarily because the systems are broken, but because they are working exactly as they were designed and intended to.

The abandonment of poor working class communities, and the suffering that is borne by people living at the peripheries, is becoming visible in different ways to more and more people. So while I completely echo and reaffirm everything Marie just said about the ways our arguments and our findings shouldn’t be convenient, I also think we are existing potentially in a moment where there is more susceptibility or willingness, or openness, to being able to hear some of these arguments in different ways, and particularly arguments about the ways capitalism and imperialism, racism and other forms of inequality—patriarchy—sustain and reinforce one another. Victims of patriarchal oppression are also the primary victims of other forms of structural inequalities.

There isn’t necessarily a way to make these arguments convenient, and there is a real danger to making them sanitized and de-radicalized in ways that make them easier to hear for people invested in reinforcing and perpetuating status quo power dynamics, but there is also an opportunity, potentially, right now to call attention to some of these inconvenient findings in ways that people are hopefully willing to hear, in ways they may not previously have been open to.

EA: You’ve both linked to, in one way or another, the importance of imagination and thinking of alternatives. I’ve been talking more recently about different futurisms, different speculative movements, whether it’s in fiction or in politics or both, whether it’s in solarpunk, Afro-futurism, Indigenous futurism, and so on. 

As a way of wrapping up this conversation, how do you think about these futurisms, and how do they inform your own thinking and your work?

ML: One of the things that we constantly come back to is the way that communities living at the margins have always, out of necessity, carved out spaces of intimacy, creativity, and radical love. We always come back to this Ruth Wilson Gilmore quote, that there are many of us already living these alternatives, and we need to move towards thinking not so much about policy recommendations and reforms that lay out a blueprint for social transformation, but instead step back and think about where change comes from. We know that change comes from the streets, the peripheries. It never comes from those who are invested in reinforcing the status quo. 

It wouldn’t be for us, from where we are sitting, to lay out what a pathway to change or transformation should look like. Instead we should think more creatively about the values that we wish to center in a more peaceful and free world. We don’t want to offer a blueprint for what that looks like, but we can come back to reaffirming what values we center in this praxis. We always talk about care, embodied love, community, non-hierarchy, solidarity, and interdependence, and think about the ways we can center these politics not only in our vision of a more just and free world but also in our everyday lives.

One of the things that people seem to often forget in this work is that if you can’t live your politics in your everyday life, if your politics aren’t personal, if you aren’t practicing the politics of love and solidarity that you wish to see in the world, then there isn’t any hope. So all we can do is work to foster and create those communities of care within the spaces that we occupy. That’s one of the things that we’ve been really deeply committed to thinking about more broadly and more structurally, and also within the context of our project, and how we realize our project and how we interact and relate with one another, and with the people who we care about and in the work spaces that we inhabit.

We think about the ways creativity, imagination, community, and radical love ground us in every aspect of our work.

MB: We do quote this line a lot from Ruth Wilson Gilmore, the brilliant abolitionist thinker and writer, that calls to revolution are often creatively stunted, and we must instead consider that “what the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces and experiments and possibilities.” So much of our own dreaming is about looking at those who are living boldly and in these experiments and thinking radically at all levels, and thinking about whether our work can find ways of centering those stories and perhaps elevating, amplifying those experiments. 

I feel the greatest amount of comfort, given the state of the world, when I realize that it’s not just a small, radical fringe group of people who are talking about building more free worlds. So many of us around the world are living in relationships that challenge a heteronormative status quo; we are mothering in ways that also differ from the heteronormative family; we are loving and leading in ways and organizing in relationship with people and all sentient and non-sentient life in ways that reject a capitalist relationship to nature that says you only have value if you can be extracted and turned into something for human profit. 

There are so many people who are thinking of ways of building more beauty into the world, and those are the experiments, the possibilities that are fuel for my imagination, and certainly for our collective imagination in this project. 

I love listening to the episodes you’ve done on solarpunk. We talk a lot about abolition and the relationship between abolitionist movements and anarcho-punk movements. There’s so much to be gained when we think about the amount of work it takes to radically imagine a world that doesn’t rely on the systems that currently exist. The more we can do that, the more hopeful I am about the direction research is going and also our world and the way we live.

EA: This might sound odd at first, but one thing I found very refreshing is that even in classicist spaces, for example on podcasts about the Roman empire, there has been a reimagining and retelling of different stories that were taken for granted in the past: a feminist retelling of the Odyssey, for example. It’s not just the myths but also historical accounts, debunking certain things and re-questioning narratives that were taken for granted based on who the source was and all of that. But what’s interesting is the question of What if, and the question of how much historians debate those two words. 

Sometimes it’s big events; What if Caesar hadn’t crossed the Rubicon? But sometimes it’s just, What if there was bad weather on that day? What if they couldn’t cross the Alps because the weather was too bad and that’s it? It’s how you start stopping taking for granted those things that we’ve taken for granted. Let’s pick a well-known date: it’s 1492, and Christopher Columbus goes there, and there’s a timeline as if this is the only way things could have been. What if? leads us into interesting ways of thinking.

One way of doing that is reading different books. What are some books you would recommend to listeners?

ML: Revolutionary Mothering by Alexis Pauline Gumbs changed my life; it tapped into and articulated themes that I had been thinking about deeply already. It’s really a book about everything Marie was just describing, about the ways we can think differently about a politics of love and the radical transformation of society; how we think about the family unit first and foremost, but also ways of caring and mothering and loving and nurturing and building feminist futures in creative and non-conventional ways that challenge ideas of hierarchy and patriarchy and domination and oppression in the most intimate spaces of our personal lives.

The second book is a recent book from Alexis Gumbs that has grounded this phase of our project: talk about beautiful segues; it’s an incredible pairing, these two books together. Alexis Gumbs’s new book is Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, and opens with a beautiful preface that we read out many times in our retreat, about breathing and the ways our breathing as human beings is interconnected, and we breathe the same air as one another, and as sea mammals and other forms of life beyond humanity all around the world. It really beautifully brings together the idea that we’ve been thinking about more in this phase of the project, about climate justice and the extractive relationship between capitalism, profit, and business politics and war.

The book isn’t about that necessarily, but what it does is tap into the idea that extraction from the environment is not a viable pathway to peace, and in order to thrive we need to really think about the ways every part of our planet is thriving and strengthened by one another. The book is a meditation primarily looking to sea mammals and sea life as a space to learn.

MB: I’m a big fan of sea life; I grew up on an island and feel most at home when I’m in an ocean. I also echo Milli’s encouragement to read Alexis Pauline Gumbs; really everything she writes is magnificent.

Elia as you were introducing the conversation about books and asking these questions about What if—I just read The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, and that is a book that does that. What if we simply re-understood or looked back to non-hegemonic sources of knowledge and understood history and evolution differently? It’s fuel for imagination in terms of how things are not that fixed. The idea of the state system is not fixed, the idea of capitalism as normal, as something that is inevitable and is always going to be there, is also not fixed. That book brilliantly troubles some of that.

Alongside Milli’s pointing to Alexis Pauline Gumbs, I read everything adrienne marie brown writes, and find that her words are a source of both nourishment and inspiration, and hope and grounding, in my own thinking. For those who haven’t read her work, adrienne marie brown wrote Pleasure Activism, Emergent Strategy, and has a new book called Holding Change. Her Octavia Butler podcast—there’s so much she does that’s really generative.

I was going to cheat by saying all of her books, but also want to highlight Maggie Nelson’s latest book of criticism, On Freedom. I also read everything Maggie Nelson writes, and find it to be challenging and provocative and brilliant. The thing I took away from On Freedom, which is a meditation on what that word means—driving yesterday, I saw signs on the side of the road that say FREEDOM! But is it freedom in terms of anti-oppression and the emancipation of all people from systems of harm? Or is it freedom in terms of the Trumpian faux-American “liberty”? Maggie Nelson’s book brings it home to an idea of praxis. The praxis of freedom is the morning after, and the morning after that. She writes that, if we’re lucky, it’s what makes up most of our waking lives. It’s an unending praxis of building more free worlds in our relationships, in our bodies, in our communities.

I’ll end by saying a book I know a lot of people have read, and I am overjoyed when I hear conversations about this book in groups that I wouldn’t expect: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and really everything Robin Kimmerer has written, including her brilliant book on moss. For me, this book is such a necessary read right now, when we’re trying to navigate that tension between what we know from science and from the academy versus what we know from being humans in the world with hearts and bodies. That tension between different sources of knowledge is just so brilliantly illustrated and articulated in her work. 

I learn so much when I read anything she’s written, in part because I wasn’t trained in any way as an ecologist or really with attention to the environment. And yet as both Milli’s and my work has evolved, it’s really grown in its attention to thinking about things like what permaculture teaches us about how to think about transformation of society. It’s something that was marginal to my education, but is actually central to my understanding of politics now. What do we learn about ecosystems thinking, and holistic systems-thinking, in terms of thinking about social transformation and women’s empowerment?

The more that I read books in that field, the more I find myself really excited about some of the connections between the lived environment and the social world, and I know I have a lot more to learn, and that’s also why I love her books.

EA: Thanks for that. This is a fantastic note to end this conversation. Thank you both for your time.

ML: Thank you so much, Elia. Such a joy to have these conversations in our different time zones and locations around the world.

MB: Absolutely.