Standing ground: How Women Interrupt Cycles of Violence
DR. SCILLA ELWORTHY discusses women’s role in stopping armed conflict and the grounding that enables speaking and acting for peace, in conversation with ANANYA PATEL.
Ananya Patel: You’ve spent decades working in peacebuilding, and a central theme in your work is the role of women in stopping armed conflict. Could you speak about your current research and what you see as essential for peacebuilding and governance today?
Scilla Elworthy: Well, first of all, it’s a pleasure to be talking to you and to have the chance to really examine why women are so important in peacebuilding worldwide now, because, for one, women are not usually instigators of cycles of violence. They start from a different place, bringing less charged emotional baggage with them. They’re so much more concerned with picking up the wounds of war, the tragedies of war, that this makes them very energized to prevent war. They use their intuition to help parties engaged in war understand what’s needed at the moment and to go a bit deeper than the question of “How many weapons does everybody have?” And we know that the male need for revenge is often triggered by shame and feelings of humiliation, including frequently a failure to protect their families. So, they seek revenge to restore their pride, and, numerically, a balance of women on negotiating teams has been shown to help reach a peace deal that lasts longer. I find this particularly interesting—if you like statistics, the 182 signed peace agreements between 1989 and 2011 revealed that those involving women are thirty-five percent more likely to last at least fifteen years.
In practice, I’ve worked in so many different countries where women are the ones who dare to stand up at a certain point and say, “Stop. This is enough.” You have to reexamine the chaos that is being caused by this war and this constant use of threats and weaponry. For example, in Northern Ireland, which is very close to me and where I’ve worked with those who have brought the two parties together to sit down and talk over the years. And secondly, in Liberia, as you know, there’s been a fourteen-year-long civil war until these two wonderful women, the peace activist Leymah Gbowee, for one, stepped in—they united Christian and Muslim women in an interfaith movement called the Women of Liberia Mass Action For Peace. They acted as intermediaries between the then-leader of the big army, Charles Taylor, and the rebel leaders. They even carried out sex strikes to stop the men from fighting. Their efforts laid the foundation for their leader, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, to become the first African female head of state. So, you know, real results come from women’s intervention.
Here in the United Kingdom in 1981, the Greenham Common women’s peace camp was set up to protest against nuclear cruise missiles being stored in an RAF camp. And I was with 30,000 women joining hands around a military base. We managed to get enough women to circulate the base completely. It was called Embrace the Base. It hit the headlines back in 1983, and the media got inspired and started reporting on the women camping at the missile site, constantly refusing the idea of more missiles being stockpiled. It took them ten years, but they were very persistent, and in 1991, all the missiles had left the base.
AP: These are such incredible stories. And the idea of including women in these seems very obvious and natural to me. But I imagine that, even with evidence and public support, this approach often meets resistance in governance. How have you worked to communicate the necessity of women’s inclusion at that level?
SE: I was used to the attitudes of our Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Foreign Affairs on these issues. And because I was reasonably well qualified, I was allowed into some of the meetings where they discussed strategy. I was in one such meeting in Whitehall, the headquarters of the military and the foreign affairs. It was a room full of, I think, 250 men, and I could count five women in the audience. It came to a point where what was being discussed and planned was so strikingly obvious, excluding women from any role in resolving some of the conflicts they were facing, that I couldn’t bear it; so, I put my hand up, got to my feet, and started to speak about the necessity of including women in conversations and agreements about peace. And the chairman went red in the face, and after I’d said about three sentences, he said, “Sit down, madam, what you have to say is of no interest here.” And I shuddered and sat down for a moment. And then I thought, No, this is not good. So I stood up again and said, “Thank you, Mr. Chairman, but I don’t think this is relevant or helpful to exclude the voice of the female in issues which concern all of us in this country.” He had to let me go on speaking, but my goodness, was I unnerved, and I had to summon up all my courage and my experience of the past: if you allow yourself to be silenced once, and it works, they think they can do it again. And so what we need as women is to draw on the experience of other women and their courage over the centuries, risking their lives, getting burned for it. We have to stand up in their memory and uplift the voices that can no longer be heard.
AP: Is the transformation from pain and loss into taking a stand also something you actively work with and teach?
SE: It’s a training, and we know that it’s not easy in many situations for women. It’s not acceptable in many cultures for women to stand up and say something about these issues. They can stand up and talk about nursery schools or nursing training, but not about war and the military. So we run training courses where we go through the skills we need to develop to take a stand. Taking a stand is key, and the course training helps develop the inner confidence that is necessary for us as women, as girls, at certain points and anywhere where things are being done and decided about a woman’s place that are deeply wounding and disenabling for women. So, what we teach people is to develop their presence. Now, that may sound odd, but you know that, as a public figure, sometimes you have to develop the habit of breathing deeply. That’s what I do. I breathe and count to ten no matter what’s happening, because unless I’m grounded, I can’t speak clearly. My voice will shake. I will betray my nervousness. Of course, we’re nervous. We haven’t been trained for this our whole lives, as many men have, so we have to develop our courage and the conviction that opening our mouths and speaking our truth, as best we can, is a service to all of humanity, and that it will spread.
Since we’ve been training women all over the world to do this, the idea that it’s legitimate for women to stand up and have a clear opinion about what is needed, whether it’s about the army or whether it’s about the way our men are behaving on the front line, or whether it’s about the decisions that are being made in our governing bodies, we have to develop not just the determination, but the dignity to stand up and say, “It is my right and my duty to speak about this.”
Taking a stand is key, and the course training helps
develop the inner confidence that is
necessary for us as women, as girls, at certain
points and anywhere where things are being
done and decided about a woman’s place that are
deeply wounding and disenabling for women.
We have people from all over the world taking the course, and we make plenty of space for those who don’t feel they speak perfect English. Why should they? And often they speak in translation, because we want people who wouldn’t normally have access to training to be able to raise their voices on difficult issues, especially embarrassing ones. Sometimes it’s a question about women’s need for privacy during their period. Sometimes it’s about how women need special allowances in the military so that they can look after themselves. It’s all the things that women sort of shudder to say because we’re embarrassed, and we are embarrassed because we’ve been silenced for so long. And so, it does take a bit of training and a bit of courage, and it’s wonderful when you find your voice, isn’t it?
AP: For sure. Through The Mighty Heart, you work with women on developing the ability to take a stand. And through my own experience with the Heartfulness Heartful Communication course, I’ve seen how challenging it can be to open up in that way. In your experience, how does this kind of training affect peacebuilding on the ground?
SE: Well, I’m just so proud of the women that we work with all over the world, the stories they’ve led—and being able to talk about it is taking a stand. And we suggest that when people feel nervous, they stand up, feel the ground beneath their feet, and feel what generations of women have wanted to say but haven’t been able to say throughout the ages. Now we can say those things without getting killed for them. And this is a powerful legitimization for women, particularly in cultures where women haven’t historically raised their voices. There’s a wonderful example from Kenya. When a lot of violence had erupted in the eastern and western parts of Kenya, a wonderful woman called Dekha Ibrahim Abdi asked 60,000 members of a women’s organization to get on their cell phones and report what they saw. When they reported this information, it enabled the peace builders to plot the hot spots of the violence and the cold spots, so people knew where to run for protection. They developed strategies for each part, with the help of trusted local leaders. In less than six weeks, this led to a complete cessation of violence; they were able to bring this violence to an end by simply informing women on the spot that they could raise their voices, that they wouldn’t get killed for it, and that their voices counted.
That kind of female intervention makes me really shiver with pride, because I know what it takes for women to drop their domestic needs and their responsibility to their families and actually get out there and stop the fighting that’s going on.
AP: As violence and activism increasingly move between physical and digital spaces, have you seen peacebuilding strategies shift in response to new forms of communication and connection?
SE: That’s an excellent question, and I don’t feel I have sufficient global information to answer it coherently, but the advent of cell phones has actually changed the experience of women. I don’t have that information, but what I do know is that women’s ability to connect over long distances, to become aware through our websites and other websites of what women are doing not very far away, and being able to get in touch with women there, through the internet, through all the connections that we have now, is incredibly useful. We didn’t have that thirty years ago. Very few of us had cell phones, and we had no networks to call on. Now you can tap into a network of 1,000 women if your organization needs to mobilize quickly. We are far more capable than we have ever been.
That capacity exerts real pressure on decision-makers—especially women leaders, who understand the importance of women’s voices being heard. Policymakers respond to volume: a flood of phone calls on a single issue. They also respond to visible, original messaging—such as women sending posters to hang in their offices.
It’s a combination of old skills and new ones, and those tools are far more accessible now than they once were.
That kind of female intervention makes me really
shiver with pride, because I know what it takes for women to drop their
domestic needs and their responsibility to their families and actually get out
there and stop the fighting that’s going on.
AP: What feels most important for you to offer younger activists who are navigating today’s complex and interconnected challenges?
There are many things I would want to say to them, but the most important is this: develop your presence. In an argument, we can sense, often intuitively, whether our opponent is nervous, artificially confident, or simply trying to bully. Part of the training I advocate is simple: practice daily planting your feet firmly on the ground. Stand, if you can, and feel the steadiness rising from the earth through your body—to the heart, the mind, and the voice. Even one minute of this, combined with deep breathing, can change how you speak. Breathing slows you down. You gabble less. People can understand you. The great advantage of breathing is that when words come out of our mouth, they are clear, they are strong, and they are rooted in our heart. And that’s where the heart comes in so strongly, because if we’re only talking from the mind, it becomes argumentative, about winning points and all that. In the end, when you talk to people after a conference or a meeting, and you ask them what they remember, they remember when somebody took a big, deep breath and said, “What I need you to know is this.” Then it comes out in two sentences, and that’s what they remember. And so, if you’re in a public meeting, or you need to stand up and say something, it’s always useful to keep it to a couple of sentences, three at the most. You get them very clear in your head, and the shorter, the better. I find that if I deliver a speech that I’ve prepared that’s two or three pages long, it doesn’t go down nearly as well as if I start with six points and I deliver the first two, and then I say, “Tell me what you would most like to hear—in what way can I meet your needs?”
The great advantage of breathing is that when
words come out of our mouth, they are clear, they
are strong, and they are rooted in our heart. And
that’s where the heart comes in so strongly,
because if we’re only talking from the mind, it becomes
argumentative, about winning points and all that.
AP: You’ve described grounding yourself physically—standing, breathing, and feeling the ground beneath you. I know gardening is important to you. How does that connection to the Earth support your work?
SE: Thank you for that question, because it’s very close to my heart. I was brought up on a small farm. I learned to love the Earth, and had a very, very domineering father who shouted at me a lot and terrified everybody. And I had to learn to stand my ground. And I realized, standing my ground means standing on the ground. So what I learned to do—particularly if I have to speak somewhere nerve-wracking—is go to a patch of grass. It doesn’t matter where; you don’t need a garden. Go into a park, or wherever you can find some actual earth with grass on it, and stand on it. Really feel that the earth, that ground, is supporting you and wants to have its voice heard through you. And it’s your job to tell the truth as clearly as you can—get it down to a few words. That’s what people will remember. And I always try to drop my voice, because if I’m talking fast and in a higher pitch, it goes in and out of people’s minds, and they can’t really remember anything I said. So, I get my voice to steady itself with my heart and be really in tune with my heart. So, what hopefully comes out of my mouth is as true as I can make it; it’s the truth that I have learned and would like to pass on.
AP: This has been very inspiring for me, and I know it will resonate with many people my age and beyond who are trying to navigate the complexities we’re all facing. It’s powerful to hear the research and experience behind your work, as well as the practical ways you’ve found to move through these challenges and take action. I’m very grateful to have had this conversation with you. Thank you, Scilla.
Scilla Elworthy
