 So, in this session, what we're wanting to do is to present an array of research which is ongoing in the several schools of the College of Asian and Pacific. I should say there's a lot of gender research right across the ANU. We've just recently formed a cross campus gender institute. I think there's something like 200 staff members working on these issues. Now, on this panel today, we're wanting to showcase some of our early career researchers like Rebecca Monson and Joyce Wu, who I'll be introducing a bit more formally later. I'm sorry because there are some inaccuracies and not updated things in the program, so I've got to give you apologies from Cathy Lopane. She accepted a late offer to speak at an international conference on sexuality in Madrid, who could resist this, and less happy an apology from Professor Cathy Robinson, who's actually an expert on Indonesia who got a very bad flu in Indonesia a week ago and is completely unable to speak this morning. So, we're in this afternoon, so anyway, our apologies. But what you will be hearing is case studies from Solomon Islands, Afghanistan, and Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea from myself. But I actually wanted to start with a question to you and the audience. And this is a very sort of leading question, I suppose. What does the word gender mean to you? I mean, just a few quick word associations. Right, OK, some more thoughts. Yeah, so somebody else here. I mean, I think it's going to be important to think about what gender means in the context of our lives. Yeah? For me, gender is, you know, it's like the socially constructed pattern. How males and females will behave. It's a consideration and a presentation of how sex is being, you know, putting into action, like the social part of it, rather than the biological part of it. That's gender. And it includes both men and women and other as well. It's not just women. Yeah, important. Yeah, and another reflection here. That's what you're going to say. He took the words right out of your mouth. Great. So, yes, and somebody else here. Yeah, my name's Emily. Just to kind of continue on there, for me, recently, it means a lot of the spaces in between what we think of as men and women, that's very much part of my experiences with the trans woman here. And I understand that Asian society has some very interesting issues around that as well. Around transgender as well. Thank you very much. And in fact, you probably said everything I'm going to say in the first few minutes. OK. So I just wanted to reflect, first of all, on the origins of our word gender. I mean, we can talk about it in lots of different languages around the world, but in English, we can really track a time in the late 1960s where gender stopped being about sort of classes of nouns in French and became this thing, like the culturally created relationships between men and women, differentiated from the biological characteristics of sexual difference. So I think that it's important to think about this very recent sort of reformulation of the word in the English language, and in fact, it's reformulation in all of the global languages of the world. So I would really see it as referring to the historically changing cultures that have created, elaborated and interpreted those differences in diverse ways as plural femininities and as masculinities. So importantly, the study of gender embraces not just women, there's often a mistranslation but also men, and also transgendered people. And that's perhaps something we could talk about in discussion. And the concept also brings into play the very complex relationship between gender and diverse sexualities, what we now, in contemporary language, call hetero, homo and bisexuality. I think it's important also to stress that it's not just concerned with individual identities and relations in the intimate spheres of our daily life and domestic life, but with the wider public worlds of work, of politics, popular culture and the media. And I've got a few slides here just to kind of give you a bit of a sense of changing gender patterns of work in different parts of the Pacific. Now in all such spheres, it also engages questions of power and inequality between persons and groups, distinguished not just by gender, but also by class, by race and religion. And I think a lot of contemporary gender scholarship is looking at those kinds of interactions between gender and those other axes of difference and I hope that our panellists will be picking that up. So as in Australia, the study of gender relations in Asia and the Pacific considers relations of power between people in everyday life, what we might call the local or the microcosmic level, but it also concerns relations at national, regional and international levels. And very often we can see gender crossing over or articulating between these levels. So, for example, in national debates about equal wages at work, in debates about equal political representation, in debates about what is the appropriate form of marriage for a nation. We're having a big one in Australia at the moment about same-sex marriage. There can also be contestations about forms of marriage being legitimated by state systems and religious systems. So, for example, in the history of Indonesia, very big debates about the role of Islam in structuring not only patterns of marriage and inheritance, but also when things go wrong like relations of divorce, patterns of rape, et cetera. So, in regional and international fora, we also witness intense and sometimes very fraught debates about gender equality in the context of domestic life, work, political representation and religious expression. So I'm referring here to those kinds of debates that go on in UN circuits but also engage a whole range of civil society actors, NGOs, et cetera. Now, the problem of gender violence is the subject of particular global concern. Now, I'm wanting to follow a very influential author by the name of Sally Ingle-Mary, some of whose work we circulated to you, in conceptualising gender violence as any act of violence where the gender of the parties is implicated. So, importantly, this is a much broader concept than just violence against women, since it also embraces violence against men and against transgender people. It's also a much broader concept than domestic violence since it includes violence beyond the household. It can include violence between people of the same sex and not just between opposite sexes. It can include in certain contexts the violence of parents and other adults against children. It extends then from acts of violence against intimate partners and family members to such acts in the context of ethnic conflicts and wars, the sexual abuse, torture and rape, which often accompanies acts of wounding, military murder and summary execution. In fact, when I came back from a conference in Perth last night, I watched a documentary on television which was about the present alleged atrocities that have happened against Hamels in Sri Lanka. So it's very important, I think, to think about gender violence as something that covers this whole spectrum from microcosmic to macrocosmic relations. Now, like all violence, gender violence raises profound ethical and political questions about our shared humanity. The study of gender violence in particular raises sharp questions about how we confront cultural and national differences. How do we reconcile the norms of an international system of justice predicated on notions of universal human rights with diverse national practices and even sometimes local norms or laws which legitimate gender violence? In a moment, I'm going to be distilling some of my own thoughts on this subject, especially Apropos Vanuatu and Pap New Guinea. But like many of my colleagues, I've been much inspired by the work of Sally Engel-Mary. She's a legal anthropologist based at New York University, but Hillary Charlesworth and I have supported her for an adjunct professorship at the ANU. So if you folks have connected with us in the future, you might see some more public lectures and so forth around. A couple of brilliant books are Human Rights and Gender Violence out of Chicago in 2006, Gender Violence, a Cultural Perspective, a Primer out of Wiley-Blackwell in 2009. Now, she argues very powerfully that we have to try to transcend this dichotomy between the universal, which is unduly identified with the West, and the particular, which is unduly identified with the non-West. And typically with countries in our region, the countries of Asia and the Pacific. We have to credit how developing universal human rights protocols have engaged the work of people from many nations over several decades, and that they draw not just on secular enlightenment models of the human individual, which had their origins in Europe around the time of the French Revolution, et cetera, but a range of other models of shared humanity from diverse philosophies and from different religions. Now, in my early study of debates about gender violence in Vanuatu, in a paper entitled, A Woman He Got a Right, a Long Human Right or No. And I should say this title is actually really the words of this rather wonderful woman, the late Grace Miramalissa, who was a very powerful politician in this small Pacific archipelago. Woman He Got a Right, a Long Human Right or No, that is to say, do women have rights in human rights or not? Now, in the paper that I wrote inspired by Grace and the work of women like her in the archipelago, I argued that in translating concepts of human rights and gender equality, we had to consider Christianity as crucial. 95% of the contemporary population of Vanuatu, population presently around 230,000 people, 95% are Christian and committed Christians. Women involved in movements to combat gender violence drew on the language of early Christian missionaries. Conversion in this archipelago started from the mid 19th century. And they also drew on the language of contemporary indigenous movements, particularly the movements of evangelical Christianity. All of these ideas promise not just to uplift women, to improve women vis-a-vis men, but also to promote domestic and public peace. So the rhetoric was very much in line with the messages of Christianity. So although far more patriarchal messages were read from the Bible by men who opposed them, who quoted things like Adam's Rib, for example, far more patriarchal ideas were promoted by some Christian churches and their adherents. These women drew on Christian ideals of a shared humanity and Christian ideals of women's universal connection. And I think that this is really important because the phase at which they were pursuing these ideas was a period in, I would say, global feminist movements where we were really stressing the politics of difference, the difference of women on the basis of race, religion, whatever. But importantly, they were really stressing universalism. But interestingly, what I was suggesting is that their universalism was not heard as such because it came from such a small, relatively powerful place. So what I'm wanting to do then is just dislodge this idea that universalism is just something articulated in New York at the UN, et cetera. So this idea about using Christianity to, as it were, translate human rights into local languages. I mean, the language I just quoted from, woman it got right along human right or no, that's the pigeon of Vanuatu called Bislama, 110 vernacular languages. These ideas of human rights have now kind of entered the language not just of the lingua franca, the pigeons, but also of talk place, the 110 local languages. So I think we have to see contemporary global conversations about human rights and gender violence, involving translations across diverse contexts and not just as importations from some imperial center in New York to distant peripheries. But in such global conversations, sorry, I've just missed a couple of my slides which are picking up this idea about the power of Christianity. But in such global conversations, I suggest our very concept of culture can be a problem. Too often in the context of development and aid, culture is portrayed as something that's necessarily shared, bounded, and eternal. I think this is an incredibly out of date archaic concept of culture, long banded by most anthropologists like me and other social theorists who would rather want to see culture as something contested, open, and changing. And what's disturbing is when we see concepts of culture being used in debates around development or human rights in this very sort of reified old fashioned sense. And I think that this raises the other question about who is it who gets to speak for culture, especially in debates about gender. We hear those who claim authority to speak. Often they tend to be older people and too often I'd have to say older men. So for example, in the idea of custom, which is a Bislama concept in Vanuatu, there's often this sort of presumption that the main people who can speak for custom are older men. Sally Engelmeri has a very interesting example that she uses in the chapter that I referred you to of a notorious gang rape, which happened in Pakistan in the early 2000s, where a number of local authority figures who dominated the local tribal council, the panchayat, presumed to define what was customary and what was correct according to Islam. So this was an attempt to define what was custom but also what was correct in religious terms. Importantly, their verdict was challenged by a local imam who actually raised the case to wider consciousness as well as eventually by General Musharraf and of course by range of Pakistani human rights lawyers and women activists. So I think it's important to see that these latter folk have equal authority to speak for culture and religion so that we're not just seeing the conservative somehow as standing for having the right to speak for culture. Moreover, I think in our globalizing world, we need to be able to speak of transnational cultures which transcend ethnic and national boundaries. As Sally Engelmeri attests through her participant observation research at many meetings between Geneva and New York, Suva and Beijing, we could see that the United Nations itself has a culture which we could analyze. So with these thoughts in mind, I'm now going to very telegraphically consider some questions about gender violence in contemporary Papua New Guinea. In January of this year, with a number of my collaborators, we completed editing a book on the subject and I'm here just offering you some of our conjoint conclusions. This photograph, by the way, is from a public poster that's been used in PNG to combat gender violence. So my first conclusion is there's no doubt as recent campaigns by Amnesty International, International Women's Development Agency and other NGOs have demonstrated that gender violence is a pervasive problem in both rural and urban areas of New Guinea. The statistics from the earlier Law Reform Commission study suggested that 67% of rural women and 56% of urban women had been beaten by their husbands. While the latest study claimed that most adult women in PNG had been assaulted at some stage in their life or raped by either their husbands or other men. So the research in this country suggests then that there is a skewing that most violent assaults are by men or women, especially wives, girlfriends and sometimes daughters. But there are also incidents of attacks by women against men, both in provocation and in retaliation and between women. Secondly, gender violence and preeminently that of men beating their wives is seen as normal. In fact, one of our contributors to this book, Fiona Hukula from the National Research Institute uses the Bismarck phrase eminormalia, inormalia. And it's normal in both senses, both as routine and also as justified. Now in PNG, as in Vanuatu and other parts of the Pacific, gender violence can be legitimated both by appeals to custom, local practice, indigenous practice and Christianity, which as I've said is the dominant language in Vanuatu, but this prevails across the Pacific. Many men now claim that by paying bridewell for their wives, they have bought the right to their sexuality, their children and their work both at home and in the garden. I should mention that bride prices typically now paid in cash. In the past, it was typically indigenous valuables like pigs and pandanus, textiles, et cetera. So suspicions of infidelity, of women using contraceptives, accusations that women are lazy, not sufficiently nurturing of children or themselves, or simply refusing to obey a husband's wishes, can all occasion violent assaults. Alas, several chapters in our book also reveal that Christianity can be used to legitimate violence. The husband as head of the household can be likened to Christ as head of the church. Pastors as much as police can see their role as one of family reconciliation rather than justice if a wife has been assaulted or raped. And in one of the most disturbing chapters in the book, we had reports of a case in Medang of the late Father Golly, head of the Legion of Mary in that place, and I think the national head in fact, actively encouraging abused wives who feared contracting HIV from their unfaithful husbands to suffer and be patient. Since he claimed only the wife's forbearance could transform their husbands, minds, and hearts. A rather different interpretation of the Bible than what I was hearing from women in Vanuatu. Thirdly, gender violence in PNG is not well adjudicated either by customary informal justice or the state system of police, prisons, and courts. The first typically values reconciliation and restoration of communal relations so that rather than compensation going to the victim, the woman who's been raped or assaulted, valuables like pigs or money primarily go to her male kin. The second typically focuses more on the individual victims and perpetrators and privileges, punishment, and imprisonment once killed is established. But again, as our different contributors show, there's a dismal record of outcomes for women, particularly those who were victims of rape and especially if they're young and mobile. And also those rapists who have ended up in prison typically deny any sense of individual responsibility and even rather see themselves as victims of the injustices of modern life. As embattled modern men, this is an idea about contemporary embattled masculinities that's been developing. Fourth, our research clearly shows that although gender violence has a long history in Papua New Guinea, where in the past rape was routinely used as a weapon of war in many parts of the Highlands and where women were killed in many areas for entering the sacred precincts of men's cult houses, it's actually the dramatic transformations of contemporary life which have occasioned new contexts and indeed new catalysts for gender violence. So around the sites of extractive industries like mining and logging, there are particularly intense conflicts between men and women which are entangled with debates about who are landowners and who has access to the new wealth. The violence of rascal gangs in towns like Port Moresby and Garoka and on the connecting highways often entails gender violence as well. So typically thefts from houses or cars are accompanied by sexual abuse and rape and often serial rape that is gang rape of a female victim by several men. In talk-pissing this is called line-up. And perhaps most worrying has been the way in which the epidemic of HIV has impacted on relations between women and men. In many ancestral cosmologies in the country, women's bodies and especially their blood of menstruation and birth was seen as a source of danger and pollution to men and there were elaborate rights to purge boys of women's blood and accumulate semen for strength. In some parts of the Highlands, any contact and especially sexual contact with women was thought to infeable men and so even in marriage, sex was infrequent. In some places women more than men were perceived as capable of dangerous witchcraft which caused sickness and death of people and pigs and ruined people's crops. Now with widespread conversion to Christianity, such ideas have been transformed but have not disappeared. Women and especially mobile or wayward women called in talk-pissing passenger meri, passenger meri or pamuk meri, these women are seen as the primary sources and the major vectors of HIV. So in national public media and local fora, sick AIDS as it's called is regularly blamed on female rather than male sexual partners and often sourced to so-called prostitutes. We could debate the wisdom of this word but women like those two Keena Meri who are making a living selling sex in the vacant blocks, blocks of cities or on the edges of highways. In several valleys of the Highlands, women have been accused of bringing sick AIDS and like witches of old have been tortured and killed. Now millions have been spent by AusAID, UNAIDS, the Global Fund and many other NGOs and agencies working in PNG to combat these twin scourges of gender violence and HIV. And I'm going to conclude with some images courtesy of Cathy Lopane who as I said went to Madrid instead. Cathy has shown both through excellent research in the Trobion Islands and at the national level where she's been responsible for writing a lot of the national plans. There's been an unfortunate condensation between local perceptions of danger and disease, evangelical Christian messages about the last days and indeed some of the earlier public health messages which stressed danger and death and especially the threats from so-called high risk groups like homosexual men and prostitutes. Indeed, some of the earlier confrontational posters and TV messages used to combat both gender violence and HIV and to promote human rights might it seems have proved even counterproductive. I would suggest that messages espousing a broader vision of peace and gender equality, espousing mutual respect and even pleasure, not just danger insects, might prove more productive and especially so if they can harness Christian precepts, practices and people. And I'm just going to end with an image from Vanuatu of one small bag theater which is also doing great work on gender violence and HIV. So I'll leave it there. Afternoon everyone. I'm going to pick up on a few of the themes that Margaret's already mentioned, including the significance of Christianity and what its relationship with human rights might be. And also the question of how useful or appropriate frameworks that are expressly grounded in the language of human rights might be. And I'm going to do this by looking at how women in Solomon Islands, which is the main country I've been working in, are actually framing their claims to participate in firstly, the resolution of violent conflict and secondly, how they're framing their claims to greater participation in decision making and dispute resolution in relation to land. And I've got a presentation in some pictures I wanted to show you. So from 1998 to 2003, Solomon Islands suffered a period of social upheaval and civil conflict that's now known by people in the Solomon's as the tension. And this conflict is generally understood as having begun in 1998 when groups of mostly young men started driving around and evicting settlers from other parts of Solomon Islands off the island of Guadalcanal. And these evictions were mostly directed at people from the neighbouring island of Malata. The root causes of the conflict were really complex, but they do include the competing claim made by the people of Guadalcanal that their rights as the indigenous custodians of the land were being eroded, particularly by settlers and particularly by settlers from Malata. And on the other hand, you had the claims from Malata settlers who were evicted from the land that they'd occupied for a very long time. And in some instances, they'd occupied it for generations. So I had a picture up here that is of a chupu, so I'll just describe it for you. A chupu in the language of, the particular language of Guadalcanal that I've been working in, means pile. And it's part of, so the pile must consist of pigs, of shell money, of food like bananas and taro and coconut and things like that, and increasingly also cash. And chupu is used as part of reconciliation ceremonies, but also as part of land transactions and to confirm people's rights to land or to confirm transactions over land. And in the picture that I was going to put up for you, you have, it's very obvious that there are men in prominent positions in this chupu. So there's one senior man who's handing over shell money and hanging it around the neck of another senior man. And this is quite a common sight. I've been to a number of chupu in Solomon Islands and you'll usually see men up front and centre doing the talking, doing the handing over shell money and things like that. And I've also got another picture which, the story is not as simple as just men doing all the talking, but I'll come to that in a minute. So a man who has great skills as a narrator and knowledge about custom and tradition is often able to strengthen his position within his group, within his social group, his tribe, by becoming a spokesperson for that group. And these men appear in ceremonies as speakers and they also appear in court when there's land disputes and then they're usually also the signatories on land titles, logging contracts, things like that. Now women don't become leaders in the same way. There are definitely women leaders on Guadalcanal, but the way they become a leader is quite different. And on Guadalcanal I've often been told that ok, the woman knows how they talk. The women cannot speak. Now obviously this doesn't mean that women can't talk generally in daily life. What it refers to is that women shouldn't really or can't speak in big public gatherings, particularly if they're about certain issues and the main issue that refers to is land. So you rarely see a woman appear as a spokesperson for her group in a land dispute that arrives in the courts, for example. Now I want to come back to the tensions. Women's organizations played a really critical role in peacemaking efforts during the conflict. And the best known of these groups is called Women for Peace. By focusing on women peacemakers in my talk today I don't want to reinforce this idea that all men are warriors and militants and all women are peacemakers. Rather I'm focusing on women peacemakers because I think that the discursive strategies so the way they talk, the way women for peace frame their claims, I think they can tell us something about how Solomon Islander women have exercised agency and they've carved out a role for themselves in a really highly volatile situation. So what did this group do? Well women for peace were involved in a whole range of activities and they included things like the formation of prayer groups so women would gather together to pray about the conflict and pray for a resolution to the conflict. They also collected and distributed food, medicine and other essential items to militants as well as to victims of the fighting. They drew attention to the social consequences of the fighting particularly the way that the conflict was affecting women, youth and children. And they held meetings with politicians, they held meetings with militants and they basically tried to open up space for mediation and conversation between the different groups. Many of these activities could have been easily seen to be a threat to male leadership. In fact I think that they probably were seen as a threat and what happened in 2000 where there was the signing of a peace agreement, the Townsville peace agreement, the militants actually succeeded in having women excluded from those negotiations and I think that's probably because they were threatened by the role that women were playing. They were both asking how did women for peace legitimise their involvement in these really highly volatile, violent and highly public arenas. I'm really sorry I don't have the slides to show you because what I was going to do was stick up some quotes from one particular woman, Dr Alice Pollard who's written a lot about the conflict and it shows you how they made their claims but I'm just going and I don't actually have them in my paper in front of me so I'm just going to have to tell you what her arguments do. So women for peace consistently emphasised their neutrality the fact that they weren't taking sides and that the fact that they weren't trying to usurp the power exercised by politicians and the male leaders of the militants and they did this in several ways. Dr Alice Pollard one of the leaders for women for peace constantly in her work she's written a lot about women for peace but she was also a key woman mobilising the women and sort of speaking out in public. She stresses the neutral, non-partisan and diverse nature of the group. She stresses that they come from many different islands in the Solomons, the fact that they come from many different churches and they have many different political allegiances. She also stressed that the women were united by their common Christianity and by quote motherhood. This emphasis on neutrality and unity probably provided a cohesive force for the women and it enabled them to organise across their diverse denominational, religious and ethnic lines. The references to motherhood and Christianity also legitimised the involvement of women in highly public forms of peace-building. In fact the cultural construction of women as peacemakers and mothers were pervasive in the language of women for peace and they drew on the overlapping and interwoven discourses of custom. Margaret's already referred to the Bislama word custom. You find it in P&D in the Solomons as well. Custom can, it has a whole lot of meanings but very loosely it refers to culture, custom tradition. And women also invoke the idea of their cultural authority as mothers and that this legitimated their involvement in formal public peace-building. And this cultural authority they rooted in the overlapping and interwoven discourses of custom and Christianity. So they often drew on Bible text regarding women. They also referred to the idea of women being mothers of the land and of the land being a mother. So from just a few examples that I've given you you can see that women drew heavily on the idiom of motherhood and they invoked both custom and Christianity to legitimise their peace-building work. Now this discourse of motherhood has often been criticised particularly by western or white feminists. It has the potential to reinforce the idea that women have an innate capacity for nurturing. There's something biological it's inherent in us. And that women are more inclined to peace-building than combat. The emphasis on motherhood can also be used, has been used to relegate women to the private sphere rather than to the public sphere. However in the Solomons it's really notable that women for peace mobilise references to maternity to motherhood in ways it's sought to legitimate their entry into the highly volatile and extremely public arena. So Alice Pollard actually expressly links the nurturing maternal role of women with the language of good governance and of the nation. Now there's two Australian scholars who've noted that the strategies used by women for peace don't seem to have translated into greater political participation in the post-conflict period. By political representation they seem to mean the participation of women in the national parliament. These scholars place responsibility for this firmly at the feet of the women peacemakers. And they argue that their strategies were quote based on gendered stereotypes and that therefore they failed to challenge traditional power imbalances. In particular that, don't worry about it. In particular in particular they write that quote it was the conceptualisation of women's activities as those of mothers and not of active citizens that led to their exclusion from the peace process. As they failed to challenge the dominant definitions and constructions of power and security leaving in place the male dominated political structure. Now I have quite a few problems with this sort of analysis. Firstly it blames women for their own subjugation and exclusion. It says that you frame your claims in the wrong way so you can't expect to have a seat at the table of the national parliament. It also undervalues the work of women as peacemakers and the risks that they might have been exposed to in doing that work. It tends to empower women in Solomon Islands by both women and men are often associated with sanctions including violence. And the strategies of women for peace were calculated to achieve particular ends and avoid certain risks. The analysis that I mentioned is also founded on particular assumptions about how we measure the empowerment of women. Why is involvement in parliament used as our measure? Solomon Islander women might be more interested in other forms of empowerment and these might in fact be occurring. And I'll actually come to this in the last bit of my presentation. The analysis also assumes that the conceptualisation of women as mothers is incompatible with the conceptualisation of women as citizens. However, as I mentioned members of women for peace expressly alighted the division between public and private and they linked motherhood with citizenship. Finally, for the reasons that I've mentioned I think that the analysis commits the kind of violence that's often been critiqued and highlighted by women of colour and post-colonial feminists. It basically frames Solomon Islander women as victims of their cultural and religious traditions. Traditions that they draw immense strength from and it essentially expects them to privilege their identities as women over their cultural and religious identities. I wish I could say that this was unusual in Solomon Islands. Unfortunately it's not. In the last few years I've had a lot of opportunities to attend meetings run by NGOs by donors and civil society organisations aimed at addressing a huge variety of issues related to the status of women. In these interactions and in others I've observed some patterns that I suspect are common elsewhere in the region and Margaret's already hinted at this in her presentation. The first is that donors and international women's organisations tend to emphasise discourses and frameworks that are expressly rooted in international human rights law. I don't think this is inherently a problem. It becomes a problem when those frameworks are privileged above any other framework to the extent that they exclude or undermine those alternatives. For example, many of these organisations particularly the non-Pacific islander staff working for them demonstrate a really deep discomfort with and even sometimes antagonism towards Christian discourses and organisations. As a general rule this isn't expressed particularly openly at least not to the Pacific Islanders that might be attending these meetings however it's more likely to be expressed openly to someone that looks like me. It's understood to be inappropriate just as openly criticising custom is understood to be inappropriate. However, at least one of the global women's organisations that is active in the region seems to have a policy of refusing to engage with church groups and I think this is really unfortunate because as I've already talked about it's well known that church women's groups can be a real source of empowerment to women that Christian discourses that prayer groups can be a source of empowerment to women and they're also less likely to attract a negative response than are other forms of women's mobilisation. More significantly though I think that it ignores the strategies that are actually being used by women. Not only women for peace but more broadly by women and by men who are challenging the subordinate position of women. Let me now return to the issue of land tenure to wrap up. I've noticed that there are really marked similarities used between the strategies that were used by women for peace and those used by Solomon Island and men and women who are advocating for a greater role for women in relation to land matters. As I mentioned the idea of land as mother and the link between maternity and land creates opportunities that are used by both men and women to oppose destructive forms of development as well as the marginalisation from women in decision making. So I talked about how women for peace used some of these strategies to buttress their role in relation to the conflict. And you also hear these mobilised in relation to the exclusion of women from decision making and the more problematic forms of development like logging and mining in Solomon Islands. So for example in 2009 I attended a big public meeting in Honiara about land matters and during that meeting one well-known woman leader angrily responded to a discussion about logging by turning to many of the men in the meeting and saying you say that you expect women and that land is your mother. If that's the case why do you rape your mother which is an incredibly powerful and confronting thing to say. She was referring to both the destruction of the ecological value of the land through logging as well as the exclusion of women from decision making regarding land use and logging. Women on Guadalcanal regularly invoke the idea of land as a mother and women as mothers of the land. Guadalcanal is a matrilineal society so this means that land is basically well your membership of a tribe which is the land holding group comes down through your mother and this idiom emphasises the matrilineal kinship and inheritance structures that provide women with social status and a role in relation to land tenure. In this sense the emphasis on motherhood has a completely different meaning to what it has when it's used in its western context. On Guadalcanal and in other matrilineal societies in Solomon Islands, maternal imagery is regularly mobilised by women and by men to challenge the relegation of women to the domestic sphere and to legitimise their involvement in the public sphere. Custom and Christianity are also prominent in debates about women's role in land matters. For a range of reasons that I can't go into here it's often difficult for women to participate in public dispute resolution or decision making but do participate often those that have really sound knowledge of custom for example the genealogies or of Christianity and are able to frame their arguments to claim greater space. Okay I now want to return to the argument made by the two scholars I mentioned earlier that the work undertaken by women for peace has resulted in changes has not resulted in changes because they drew on the idea of motherhood. I'd argue that given the importance of land in Solomon Island society women's involvement in land matters is at least as important as their representation in parliament or their participation in parliament. There's some evidence that the tension the conflict opened up new opportunities and new arguments for women's involvement in land matters. On more than one occasion I've heard the tensions referred to as the consequence of sin. That sin being the exclusion of women from decision making regarding land. So I think this is a really powerful way of framing the tensions and claiming greater space for women's involvement in land matters. So in conclusion what I want to say is unfortunately nothing original but clearly something that must keep being said. Paying attention to the strategies that are actually being used by women as well as by men is absolutely critical to understanding how they're challenging the subordinate position of women in politics at all levels of society. Thank you. Thank you Margaret for that introduction. Just to let you know I'm only giving the as Margaret mentioned I'm only giving the Afghanistan case study but my report which is being printed by Oxfam Australia will be coming out later this year which is based on my field research in Afghanistan Pakistan and Timor-Leste. So if you're interested just you to check Oxfam Australia's website later this year. So what I want to propose to you today is that whilst we can agree that violence against women is an issue which occurs in every country this does not mean that there is a standard blueprint solution which is universally applicable in every context. The assumption that there is a universal solution becomes very problematic when you consider countries such as Afghanistan where there's have been broader issue of gender and women's rights have been politicised if you just think about quite a few years ago the US occupation of Afghanistan on the justification among many that we need to liberate Afghan women and you can remember the images of women being stoned by Taliban and that sort of very political politicised sort of message about military campaigns justified on the grounds of liberating women as an excuse and I guess one of the outcomes of that politicisation of women's issues by politicians is that gender and violence against women's issues have become a very sensitive topic in Afghanistan and to the extent where local communities equate women's issues with a western agenda despite the history of community based individual women's activism on women's equality in Afghanistan and certainly when I was doing my field work in Afghanistan last year one of the recurring themes which I came to me from the local as well as international NGOs is that gender is a very sensitive topic one example being that a European non-government organisation which has been operating in the country for the last 20 years in a non-governmental area on poverty alleviation they told me that later to me one story where earlier in 2010 there was in one of their project sites the local woman came to them and said domestic violence is a really big issue and we would really like your organisation to become involved in addressing this situation in particular we want the men to be stopped so even though this was a plea coming from the local woman the organisation the NGO that I spoke to said well even though this is coming from local needs identify our local people we were in a dilemma because on the one hand half of the staff said yes we have to do something the other half said well because gender is such a sensitive issue if we try to address it and would that jeopardise our entire aid aid program so as you can see from that and some other case stories which I won't have time to relate to today including international and national local NGOs themselves they themselves also internalise assumptions about and values about gender which makes gender equality issues including violence against women even more difficult to be addressed in the country so due to this social and political sensitivity about gender in Afghanistan international donors and aid organisations have sought to find different entry points to discuss the issue and one of the emerging trend which is coming emerging from international donors in particular is this notion that we have to use the Islamic framework as an entry point to get communities to accept gender projects particularly on violence against women's issues which you can see sort of it makes strategically it makes sense because Afghanistan is an Islamic state with a 99% Muslim majority so for coming from that perspective if you're talking that using Islam can have sense of universal is easiest way to reach a common ground sort of understanding and certainly from my own perspective I also recognise that there are much benefits to using Islam as an entry point and engaging with local communities because this also includes the opportunity to bring together both progressive and conservative clerics and scholars and to foster dialogue between the two which is what some of the international and local NGOs have been doing however what I am concerned about is how international development agencies and to some extent the local non-government organisations as well are pushing for a cookie cutter approach on how to instrumentalise Islam and that is a very top down and instructive approach particularly when it comes to involving men in gender equality initiatives and I will give you a case study from a joint project which is between the UNFPA which is the UN Population Fund the German Bilateral Aid Agency known as GIZ Afghanistan Ministry of Women's Affairs and the Afghan Ministry of Religious Affairs and the Hajj so this is a joint project between both the Afghanistan Government the German Bilateral Agency as well as the UN the project is called Happy Family Healthy Society and basically what its premise is because men are the primary decision maker in a household and that includes actually decision making about access to medical and education so what they have done is they have trained local mollus the Islamic clerics and local communities to be educators to be sort of educators with the men and basically to advocate local men to provide women with greater access to medical care to girls if they had daughters to allow girls for education and that sort of advocacy and so this project has been in operation since 2007 operating in around 16 districts near Kabul which is the capital city I was going to show you some slides from a booklet but unfortunately I'm not able to today so I'll just try to quote from memory of what the booklet mentioned so even though the project does not directly address violence against women the religious leaders are trying to talk about gender equality within the context of healthy family relationships including domestic violence from an Islamic perspective and so thus subsuming domestic violence within the wider agenda of family relationship in addition the project's aim is to use the trained religious leaders to reach out to Afghan men with the assumption that men will pay greater attention to religious teachings as Malawi Manuddin a ministry of religious affairs official who took part in a project explained when Afghan people were given action based on their religious values they will listen and accept so it's a very top down approach at least from this gentleman's perspective and one of the examples was the booklet which I'll just quote from memory it goes something like this basically the booklet says the entire message of the booklet is men should regard wife as an equal and regard her quote as his best friend at all times he should treat her with respect dignity and consult with her on every matters and then following with that sort of advocacy messages then you have these quotes from the Quran and the Hadiths which seek to give religious support to that message and then there's also a very sort of nice pictures of the paintings of Afghan men presenting his wife flowers and happy family images throughout the booklet so I think my critique is that this sort of education or sort of pedagogy assumes Afghan men are ignorant this assuming they are not politicized or that they are unaware of the attempts and intentions of the donor agencies taken face value as an education tool on itself the booklet doesn't even offer opportunities for men to reflect on what it actually means for instance in Afghanistan most marriages are arranged marriages there are instances but it is rare for marriages to be formed based out of friendship and love in that context how do you then try to say to a man you have to see your wife as your best friend and if you do want him to come to accept that shouldn't there have been some examples in the booklet on how to relate to a woman or how to begin to understand what it means to be a woman within his society or what it means to be a man in his society and so in this sense it feels like the audience of this booklet are not the Afghan man or the community but rather it's to showcase to the foreign donors the Western audience on what is being done in Afghanistan and by using one minute so just to quickly summarize while international donors have good intentions in using Islam what they're also doing is marginalising local women and also human rights activists and it is also presuming that there is only one way on how to use Islam to advocate and in conclusion just as there is a risk in presuming human rights as the normative approach to address gender equality I think there is also a risk of presuming Islam as the universal approach in Afghanistan thank you