Following the 1993 Oslo Accords international donors have initiated numerous joint Israeli, Palestinian and international women’s peace-building projects, often heralding them as a model for peace and gender development. In such initiatives, particularly in psychosocial approaches to conflict resolution, the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’ is often called upon to support the focus on the (inter-) personal level and the claim that women find it easier than men to overcome national, class, ethnic and other divides. This, however, is a misinterpretation of the feminist slogan. Its meaning was changed from denoting that women’s so-called personal problems stem from and are linked to broader systemic structures, to proposing that all political circumstances are the result of personal choices and actions of individuals. Supporters of psychosocial conflict resolution argued that people need to change their personal attitudes toward the other first, before political structures can be changed. In joint Palestinian-Israeli women’s dialogue groups a discussion of women’s strategic gender interests is often encouraged to establish a shared platform across the divide. Based on ca. 50 semi-structured interviews, several focus groups and many informal conversations with women from the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza during 2007-9 my paper shows that most Palestinian women reject such psychosocial approaches. The great majority of my informants wanted to see political and material changes first, before they would consider personal or strategic gender issues and reconciliation. For them policy interventions that start from the personal are not convincing, because they risk doing what ‘the personal is political’ was originally intending to prevent: they might detach individual personal problems and agency from broader material, political and ideational structures and thus minimise chances of ‘reaching up’ to affect political changes. Women’s transnational peace initiatives can be successful in bridging national, class, ethnic and other divides only if they adhere to the original meaning of the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’. Rather than pathologising the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as one stemming from (individual) identity issues, they need to acknowledge its political and historical roots and the direct and harsh impact that the occupation has on women’s everyday lives. Women’s transnational peace activism in Palestine/Israel needs to follow a joint political agenda of resisting the occupation, additional to - but not instead of - which it might propose shared gender or feminist goals.

This paper considers the shift in gender relations and identities after the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq and asks what happens to gender identities and relations when women’s empowerment is apparently an objective of war/invasion (as claimed by the US administration)? In this way, the paper demonstrates how the construction of gender should not only be considered in relation to national and state processes (Yuval-Davis 1997) but also with regard to transnational processes—in this case, that of the US pursuit of its strategic security objectives. Based on interviews with US officials, NGO workers and Iraqi women activists, undertaken over a period of 3 years, the paper highlights the gap between US administration measures to promote women’s empowerment, on the one hand, and the deteriorating reality for women on the ground. Whilst growing conservatism towards gender relations can be linked to trends apparent during the sanctions period (Al-Jawaheri 2008), this paper examines how US measures after 2003 have enabled the consolidation of these trends. This includes the empowerment of Iraqi political leaders with sectarian agendas and the subsequent instrumentalization of women’s rights within the framework of a new identity politics, and the undermining of national state institutions, which enabled a violent competition for power between various actors in which women’s bodies became part of the battlefield. In effect, US rhetoric of ‘women’s empowerment’, even when sincerely articulated by mid-level US State Department officials, is undermined by US pursuit of strategic objectives in Iraq (namely, ‘stabilizing’ Iraq). US actions have contributed to the construction of more restricted gender identities as a result of their deployment both as a tool of resistance of US occupation and as a tool of US allies to establish/maintain their authority--both with negative impacts upon women’s rights and position within society.

In contexts in which gender is instrumentalized by those actors who are implicated in war and occupation and where the international promotion of gender mainstreaming may intensify rather than ameliorate gender inequalities, what role can feminist/women’s solidarity movements play and what sort of transnational feminist politics should be constructed in contexts of post/conflict in order to support women’s empowerment and peace building? My paper addresses these questions and discusses underlying theoretical issues and political dilemmas which have emerged in relation to my own empirical research in Iraq and amongst the Iraqi diaspora in Jordan, the US and the UK as well as the empirical research of colleagues who have focused on transnational feminism in the contexts of either Iraq or Palestine. The involvement of diasporas in transnational networks with regard to countries in conflict complicates the picture. On the one hand, diaspora activists may provide important bridges between activists in the North and those in the South. They are able to mobilise necessary resources to send back to their countries of origin, in order to contribute to the rebuilding of their countries. On the other hand, the desire of diaspora activists to participate in the nation from outside, through involvement in international political advocacy, as well as social welfare and development projects within their countries of origin may be perceived as an attempt to capitalise on their diasporic positions to create new hierarchies of power within their countries of origin. This is often perceived to be at the expense of those who “stayed behind” and who may have suffered persecution and deprivation. Moreover, women from the diaspora are often even more vulnerable to feelings of resentment or active discrediting on the part of local actors. This trend has been particularly evident in the Iraqi context where the diaspora has played a disproportionate role in the new Iraqi leadership supported by the US and US-based Iraqi women have benefited from US funding to establish NGOs within Iraq. Meanwhile, the politics of diaspora mobilisation, often focused on the rebuilding of the nation, may be diametrically opposed to transnational feminist politics, which seeks to highlight the ways in which national and state processes involve the construction of hierarchies of power and oppressions. This is obvious in the Iraqi Kurdish but also Palestinian situation where nationalist politics play an important role amongst women’s rights activists.