On viewing war photography, Susan Sontag had a famous aphorism: “No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.” (Regarding the Pain of Others, Picador, 2003)
For all of its accomplishments, the promise of PBS documentary Women, War and Peace is that it opens a space for conversation about that ‘we’ in the sensationalized, often-suffocating clamor of war media. Intellectually ambitious but lushly photographed, incisive but circumspect, the five-part series that aired on PBS this past October and November—now out on DVD—documents women’s active participation in the political processes surrounding a number of major conflict zones around the world. Creators Abigail E. Disney, Pamela Hogan, and Gini Reticker have produced a series that’s likely to challenge conventional expectations for war documentaries: how we watch them, how we make them, and how we think of the ‘we’ in regards to the conflicts that they represent.
History, experience, and common sense suggest that women have always participated actively as shapers of conflict events. Yet as they note in “Notes from the Executive Producers” on the Women, War and Peace website, Disney, Hogan, and Reticker’s quest began with the realization that war journalism seldom represents women as more than the passive victims of conflict. Even as people who are not men have long fought in war, protested war, engaged in diplomacy to end war, and even initiated wars, contemporary news media under represent and misrepresent the influence of women on conflict processes.
Media persists in the glaring gendering of warfare as male work. Of course, many armed forces remain highly gendered, and if someone were idealistic enough to assume that warfare only involves conflicts between different armed forces, maybe this gendered representation would be accurate. But as a practical matter, war has never been primarily men’s work and it’s never solely affected men. The collective pretending that it’s so, should stop.
Out of a desire to counterbalance the mainstream media’s misrepresentation came the extraordinary (and award-winning) 2008 documentary, Pray the Devil Back to Hell. In this dramatic account of the Liberian Women for Peace movement, Disney, Hogan and Reticker show how a group of women — led in part by Leymah Gbowee, who recently accepted the Nobel Peace Prize — decisively influenced the 2003 peace talks which ended a long and violent civil war in Liberia. That movie also aired on PBS as the second part of the series, though it does not appear on the newly released DVD. Narrated entirely by the women of the movement, it’s available free online, and at less than an hour, it’s more than worth it for watching the making of an extraordinary Nobel laureate.
Taken with the earlier movie, the four original episodes featured on the DVD set—each about an hour long—will also make for one of the more fascinating and innovative documentary series that you’ll ever see. Alfre Woodard, Tilda Swinton, Matt Damon, and Geena Davis provide solid, unobtrusive narration, and the production values shine without sparkling—putting the people at the foreground and capturing the stories in flawless, crystal clarity.
The first episode, “I Came to Testify”, tells the story of a group of Muslim women who suffered from sexual abuse and violence during the conflicts in the ’90s Bosnian war, as they succeed in bringing the perpetrators of violence to criminal justice before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Shifting to Afghanistan, the second episode, “Peace Unveiled”, shows the struggle of a group of woman Afghan political leaders as they try to shape, in the midst of violence and gender discrimination, the 2010 Karzai peace talks with the Taliban. The third episode, “The War We Are Living”, traces the movement of a group of Afro-Colombians, led by a female mine worker and a female social worker, protesting the expropriation of their land by a wealthy mining industrialist, an expropriation bound up with the ongoing conflict between guerillas and paramilitaries in some parts of Colombia.
All of these stories are harrowing, and all of the protagonists experiences serious threat to life and limb. But the documentaries never sensationalize, and each ends with the promise of a better future and a sense of the protagonists’ empowerment.
For the most part, the documentary series remains even-handed in its coverage, even as the writing maintains clear sympathies with the women whose stories the narrators tell. Even while the women confront powerful national and international leaders, or convicted rapists, known terrorists, and perpetrators of genocide (sometimes all of the above, sometimes face-to-face), there’s little of the demonizing that 24 hour news cycles use to spice up the stakes of conflict coverage.
But at the same time, don’t expect the current affairs documentaries that seem to drone on for days on a Saturday afternoon interspersed with pledge drives. The interviews in Women, War and Peace are real; the interviewees are dynamic, knowledgeable. The events covered are fresh and newsworthy. The subjects are inspiring without being romanticized. You feel like you’re being talked with rather than at. The producers take little—including the viewer—for granted.
It’s in the final episode, “War Redefined”, that the creators reveal the huge scope of their project’s thinking—as well as its limitations. Drawing on the paradigm of ‘human security’, the contributors convincingly show the ways that including gender analysis in diplomatic politics—and the inclusion of women in the processes of war and peace—can reshape the ways in which we understand war. Fortunately, none of the contributors to the documentary take the simplistic stand that involving more women will end war. This final episode, though, certainly invites journalists and members of the media to reconsider how we know war. For the vast majority affected by war, conflict isn’t just played out in the firing of gunshots and the dropping of bombs. It’s also played out in the disruption of lives and childhoods, the scarcity of food and resources, in sexual violence and economic devastation.
Some viewers might cast a critical eye on the terms by which the documentary conceptualizes ‘womanhood’. Many feminist theorists have long questioned the politics of presuming a common ‘we’ in the space between two individuals who identify as women. To be sure, it’s clear that the series’ creators have done their best to give a rounded picture of Western women’s involvement: while showing much of the good work that Western women have accomplished, for instance, in Afghanistan, the documentaries also manage to avoid the “rescue narrative” that often dominates the representation of women in conflict zones. The creators also avoid representing the misguided point of view—voiced by an interviewee in one of the online features—that “women are peacemakers by genetics”.
But while women’s experiences may help to redefine what we think of as war, the final episode largely ignores the question of which women will have more or less access to the power to redefine it. When the documentary presents Condoleezza Rice voicing her “concern” for human security, it’s worth remembering that she shares the same gender identification as the Iraqi women whose human security she helped to rob and whose lives she assisted in ruining by planning the invasion of their country. There’s a big difference between Rice and Leymah Gbowee, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Tawakkul Karman. Women do actively shape war and peace, but they do so at different levels of access to power, and not always to one another’s benefit—a point that I hope viewers will remember and voice in the absorbing dialogue that will come out of Women, War and Peace.
Important note about the DVD: the great and copious special features for the series—as well as the entire series itself—are available here, for free, online. How long the series will remain online remains to be seen.