A Discussion with Kathleen Kuehnast, Gender Advisor, U.S. Institute of Peace

With: Kathleen Kuehnast Berkley Center Profile

June 8, 2010

Background: This June 2010 exchange between Kathleen Kuehnast, an advisor on gender issues at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), and Susan Hayward focuses on Kathleen's experiences working in Northern Ireland and in Kyrgyzstan, which in turn led her into the field of conflict resolution, with a particular focus on gender dynamics in conflict. Kuehnast presses for religion to be better understood and examined as it relates to gender dynamics in conflict and peace.

Tell me a bit about your background and how you became involved in the field of conflict resolution.

I’m from a Norwegian-German family. Both parents were Lutheran, but there was controversy when they married because they came from different schools of Lutheranism.

My family moved 14 times before I was in ninth grade because my father was in the military—for example to Germany, the Philippines. So I was exposed to a tremendous amount of travel and different practices and cultures from early on. I witnessed everything from Filipino Catholicism to Shintoism in Japan. I was often put in religious parochial schools, and so I had a great deal of religious education—classes on the scriptures, etc. By the time I was in high school, I had become really interested in Buddhism (particularly Zen) and Judaism. I think I was an anthropologist before I knew it. By the time I was in college I had come to identify with Unitarian practices and attended a Unitarian church for 20 years. I thought about seminary, but I didn’t go down that path.

Where I did go was to Northern Ireland to work at Corymeela, which is a camp on the North Sea that brings kids primarily from Belfast to do reconciliation work. I was the director of outdoor education. So I spent a lot of time in tents with Catholic kids on one side and Protestants on the other. They were young—about 6 or 7 years old. This was my first realization of how early the stories of hatred are inculcated into communities in conflict. It was both a troubling and an amazing summer for me, in terms of coming to an understanding of how these young children lived seeing and hearing extreme violence, and themselves expecting it as a normal part of life. They had been acculturated into a society of violence, and they were being prepared for it by their parents and teachers, in some ways. The camp tried to provide an alternative space to bring these groups together. I had found about Corymeela while at a retreat north of Minneapolis. I read a brochure about it and decided I had to go there. And like that, my life took a new path.

So this is when I first came head-to-head with conflict. I was very naïve. I bicycled alone through Northern Ireland, which drove my parents crazy. I bought a bike in Shannon and toured up the western coast, across the mountains, and back down the other side. It was an amazing ethnographic study. The first days I was speaking with the Irish who thought what was going on up there in the north was crazy, and the Northern Irish were crazy to get all worked up by this conflict. Once I got up north, I was stopped a lot more by police. I looked about 15 years old and not all that threatening, so they let me go.

After this I was an artist for awhile, making pottery. When I was about 30 years old I went to Africa, climbed Kilimanjaro, and on this trip decided to pursue a doctorate in anthropology. I had intended to work among the Maasai and study the impact of socialism on nomadic groups, but I discovered I couldn’t because of my health. So I found my way to Central Asia because of some quirky circumstances.

While I was in the field doing my dissertation, I was approached by a social scientist from the World Bank who asked me to do a poverty assessment of women in Kyrgyzstan. This is when I began my work in development anthropology. In many ways, the post-conflict environment in Kyrgyzstan was similar to a post-conflict situation. Life had changed overnight when the Soviet Union withdrew; every aspect of their lives changes. I was on the ground during the transition, so I witnessed these changes; overnight many became impoverished. It had a profound impact on me to see the daily and persistent demise of their once stable lives. In addition, there was a war in Tajikistan, so violence was nearby, and there were concerns about the potential for conflict in Kyrgyzstan because of interethnic issues and limited resources. I was called on to conduct assessments about conflict potential and prevention. Thus, I began to formally engage in the conflict literature and projects on conflict, where I examined the role of community driven development in post-conflict zones. I ended up working with the World Bank for about a decade, where among many projects, I looked at the question of how people resolve everyday conflicts and indigenous processes for resolving local conflicts, as well as more specifically at border and water conflicts in Central Asia.

What were you doing your doctoral work in, before you were tapped by the World Bank?

I was a cultural anthropology student, and my dissertation looked specifically at what was happening with religious re-identification of everyday practices of Muslim culture in Central Asia under Soviet control—practices that were not considered religious practices because the practice of religion was illegal. For example, the practice of circumcision, which the Soviets had outlawed, where as in Islam, circumcision is an important rite of passage; it connotes cleanliness and inclusion into the brotherhood. I remember speaking to a very personal friend who said although they may have stopped circumcising their sons, they more or less symbolically practiced this rite through circumcision of their sheep. So they had transferred the practice onto their animals, who are important parts of day-to-day lives for these nomadic groups.

During my time in the field, I spent some time with an itinerant healer; she was very interesting because her healing practices incorporated both shamanistic and Muslim beliefs. She travel throughout the rural regions around Lake Issyk Kul. Because the Kyrgyz were the last to be Islamized in Central Asia, they had retained many shamanistic practices. Some are believed to be remnants of the a period in which the Kyrgyz had lived in Siberia. Their practices included animism, which was intricately connected to the earth, sky, and water; these connections were still a part of their day-to-day lives. Yet the shamans I spent time with also drew upon the Qur’an in their healing practices.

I spent time with four different shamans—all female. Female shamans are greatly revered among the Kyrgyz, and usually it was considered that young girls were more likely to be called to be shamans than males. One of the varied responses I received when I began asking about religious and Islamic practices among Kyrgyz women was that “men are Muslims, women are shamans.” There was a separation of religious identity but also space—the practice of religion.

What did shamans provide the community as opposed to the male imams?

During the Soviet Union, shamans maintained a quiet presence especially in the rural regions. The shamans dealt with day-to-day issues, and health and mental illness were a big part of their job description. I remember a young child who had suffered severely bad dreams. The shaman worked with him, pouring hot wax into a pan just above his head, spinning it in a can and pouring it on the ground to determine the child’s problem.

The Kyrgyz were among the last of the nomadic groups in that region to be Islamized. Russia’s Catherine the Great determined that the best way to deal with all the warring tribal groups in territories under her control was to bring them religion, so the introduction of Islam to the nomadic Kyrgyz and Kazakhs had been a true religious social engineering.

I went to the field with the question of how “Sovietized” were these Central Asian Muslim women. Up until the late 1980s, the only scholars allowed into the Soviet Republics were historians and a handful of political scientists who used Soviet archives. I was one of the first wave of academics who were allowed in to live among Soviets and to see the ways in which religion was manifested in everyday life.

When I was a post-doc at the Library of Congress I spent a great deal of time looking at travel diaries of monks who had traveled through the Silk Road. They always noted that the Kyrgyz stood apart as tribal groups of Central Asia. The women were never veiled, and they played a notable role in Kyrgyz society.

The Soviet ideology had focused on gender equality. One of my dissertation questions was how much had this Central Asian group inculcated this ideology? My conclusion was that they had absorbed the ideals of gender equality. So there was a division after the Soviet withdrawal, especially for the older generations who had assumed they would always be engaged in work. Many gender issues arose during the transition.

Tell me more about what you are currently doing at USIP.

My job is to coordinate the gender programs here at USIP. Specifically in terms of the initiative, I have focused on UN Security Resolution 1325 because this is the resolution’s tenth anniversary year, but also because I think it falls in line with the USIP mandate and provides an excellent framework for our work. I have also looked at sexual-based violence in conflicts. My approach has been to problematize the assumption that a gender lens is equivalent to a focus on women. If we want to understand the role of gender in conflict, we need to look at masculinity and femininity issues in conflict and conflict resolution, and how these relate to issues of religion, culture, etc., and then to look in particular at the ramifications for women.

So have you discovered any assumptions or questions emerging about how religion intersects with these issues of gendered experiences of conflict and peace?

The question of religion is not brought into the sphere enough. I’m always pleased with a panelist or audience member who raises the question of religion and its relation to either conflict or conflict resolution, because in many ways religion is like the elephant in the room, both as an issue driving conflict but in a less obvious way, how it can be a proponent for peace. It is at the nexus of many of these issues. I think the fact that women play a profound religious role at the grassroots but do not generally play a top-down role should not be underestimated.

There is no doubt that religion refines inequality between the sexes, stigmatizes same-sex relationships, and that is a critical part of all this. Gender tends to be stereotyped—male and female—but gender is really about the relational roles of identity. Rather than one’s biological definitions, it is about how society and culture shape gender expectations and norms. Again, this is why Kyrgyzstan was such an interesting place, because it had been one of the least segregated places in terms of male/female practices, along with that Soviet overlay of gender equality, and I was fascinated by how they had made sense of all these different gender norms and chose what worked for one situation over another.

Have you discovered anything in your work that seems to differentiate women’s approaches to conflict resolution or peacemaking?

I think that because women have the primary responsibility for raising children around the world, their view is shaped by that responsibility—for better or for worse. I think women are as capable to replicate the stories of revenge and retribution as much as men. This is an area that is understudied, but my experience as an anthropologist on the ground is that women are a key revolving door in which the stories of identity—how you are shaped as a group, however you define that group—are carried forward.

As peacebuilders—and here I’m thinking about both day-to-day practice and the formal—women often understand more the nuance of relationship and if they are inclined, and if they have significant leadership capabilities—because it takes great deal of leadership to go against the social flow of a culture in working against conflict—then I think their ability to have an impact on conflict is quite extraordinary. But the socialization of girls and boys is often different and sometimes very different when schools are segregated by gender.

You know it is difficult to generalize about gender. It makes me nervous to do so! But having said that, I think it is incredibly important that women, religion, and peacebuilding are in one sentence. I think that these three subjects together are only beginning to be considered. This is an important step in beginning to document how the three are dynamically interconnected. All three terms—women, religion, and peace—are incredibly loaded, and what they yield together is a work in progress. Just the process of beginning to articulate the nuance of these relationships will move this sphere forward.

Are there any particular questions you bring to the July conference?

I think one question is what does “women in leadership” mean in the formal sphere of religion, when religious leadership roles are dominated by men? In that context, I don’t really understand what "women’s leadership" means. Where do they fit into the hierarchy?

The second question is what impact do women of faith actually have in peacebuilding today?

I hope we will hear many stories coming out of the two-day conference. I hope we begin to coalesce and document what women’s religious peacemaking really looks like.

Third: how do you bring the top and the bottom closer together? How do we bring women into formal leadership of religion, and how do we bring men into the local level of women involved in religious peacemaking? It has to go both ways.

The problem, as I see it, is what is women’s religious peacemaking? Is it a movement, a philosophy, does it even exist? How do we give it shape, form, voice, theory across religious traditions… and then, what is its impact on formal religion and on conflict?

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