GENDER AS A DRIVING FORCE IN WAR

Thank you for that generous introduction. It’s a great pleasure to be here in Hamilton, in company with this room full of interesting and engaged people from the university and the city. I'd like to thank the director, staff and council of the Centre for Peace Studies very much indeed for entrusting me with these lectures. I’d also like to thank the Leppman family, whose memorial fund for Keith Leppman has sponsored my visit. It's been a welcome opportunity to spend time with researchers and teachers here and to find out more about the important work being done here at McMaster University in women’s studies and peace studies. When I look to the list of previous Bertrand Russell peace lecturers and see the wealth of experience, and the huge authority, they've brought to this series of talks, I know I’m seriously underqualified for the task. Rather than suffering war, I live in a country that exports it to other regions. I don’t have important responsibilities. I study violence from a safe distance. But there is one small thing I hold onto, that gives me a degree of confidence: it’s the fact that what I’m going to talk about today and tomorrow I can bring to you rather directly from a host of women who are better positioned than I am to understand war. As a researcher, my work for as long as I can remember has been listening to women and men making sense of their lives. These lectures draw on the concluding chapters of a book published exactly a year ago that contained the findings of an empirical research project into women’s organizing against militarism and war, that took me on 80,000 miles of travel to over twelve countries in two years (Cockburn 2007). So I’d like to acknowledge this debt and thank these women for sharing their analyses with me. They have a range of standpoints and perspectives, and I trust the sum of their perceptions.