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United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on ‘Women, peace and security’, passed in 2000, reflects a recent growth in women's peace activism. Women's resistance to violence is widely believed to be a mobilizing factor in both local and international peace movements. This provokes questions around essentialism and violence of concern to feminists: are men inherently territorial and aggressive, and women naturally nurturing and peaceable? Or is the behaviour of both conditioned by particular local configurations of social relations of power? This contribution reviews these questions in the light of the experiences of women's peace organizations. It concludes that essentializing women's roles as wives, mothers and nurses discourages their inclusion as active decision makers in political arenas, as well as overshadowing the needs of other disadvantaged groups. Rather than seeing war as the violation of women by men, we should recognize that men and women are each differently violated by war.

Do gender relations change through conflict? How might conflict itself be fuelled by aspects of gender identity? A recently completed research project that combined oral testimony with more conventional research methods concluded that conflict has undoubtedly given women greater responsibilities, and with them the possibility of exerting greater leverage in decision making and increasing their political participation. The research sheds light on the role of ordinary citizens as 'actors' responding to crisis, and describes how gender identities are woven into a complex web of cause and effect in which war can be seen as a 'conflict of patriarchies'.

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on 'Women, peace and security', passed in 2000, reflects a recent growth in women's peace activism. Women's resistance to violence is widely believed to be a mobilizing factor in both local and international peace movements. This provokes questions around essentialism and violence of concern to feminists: are men inherently territorial and aggressive, and women naturally nurturing and peaceable? Or is the behaviour of both conditioned by particular local configurations of social relations of power? This contribution reviews these questions in the light of the experiences of women's peace organizations. It concludes that essentializing women's roles as wives, mothers and nurses discourages their inclusion as active decision makers in political arenas, as well as overshadowing the needs of other disadvantaged groups. Rather than seeing war as the violation of women by men, we should recognize that men and women are each differently violated by war.Judy El-Bushra developed her current interest in the overlaps between gender and conflict as themes in research, policy and practice while working with ACORD over twenty years. She currently manages the Great Lakes Programme of International Alert, 346 Clapham Rd, London SW9 9AP, UK.

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