NOT JUST SITTING PRETTY: Cynthia Cockburn (above); two of her tomes on women combating violence

There is something reassuringly predictable about Cynthia Cockburn. You can spot her in London street corners with other women, waving anti-war posters, every week, every Wednesday, and dressed in black. At other times, you may be sure to find her in the conflict-ridden zones of Ireland, Palestine or Israel. And always, she will wear black while conducting her work, researching the conditions and facilitating connections among the women who live in these regions, so precariously and perpetually in fear.

Still other times, she will be found talking ? yes, peace, and still wearing black ? to students on related issues of identity politics and feminism in the department of sociology, City University, London, where she is a visiting professor. Cockburn, founder-member of ?Women in Black?, a group opposing war and militarism, is a researcher, author of five inspirational books and a passionate peace activist.

It is not often that one gets invited to breakfast by the author of The Line, a book about a remarkable movement in Cyprus, a country with a history of violence between Greeks and Turks. A relevant book for readers concerned about political violence, whether ethnic or religious, it finds resonance in the psyche of readers of the subcontinent battered by the Hindu-Muslim divide. Between cups of coffee and a barrage of questions on how we in India organised protests against the US invasion of Iraq, Cockburn revealed how she interacted and engaged for months with women in Cyprus to write about Hands Across the Divide, a group the warring women formed and the imaginative moves for reconciliation and new ideas of equality.

Expectedly, it?s an insider?s perspective Cockburn brings with her when she researches for her books. A sociologist who works half in and half out of the university, she has always tried to connect her research to activism. She makes no bones about being scientifically neutral. It was in Yugoslavia that she learnt that war is productive in its own twisted kind of way: it produces lines along ethnic groups. In the 1980s, before the war broke out, there was hardly much ethnic difference or violence between the Serbs and Croats and there was free intermarriage; people could not tell an Orthodox church from a Catholic one ? leave alone that people didn?t bother to go to church at all.

?The war was designed to change just that,? she says. ?After thousands of men and women have been murdered by extremist Serbs, the victims are aware of their identity as Bosnian Muslims.? The war produced gender lines too. It produced ?proper active warrior men and proper victimised submissive women,? she said. These gender lines remain long after the war has subsided.

In Northern Ireland, she saw how women negotiated ? most skilfully ? the issue of identity that has caused a lot of pain and suffering. Her experience led to the book The Space Between Us, in which she observes that while the women did not deny their identity as Protestants and Catholics, they looked for common ground on which to work together: memories of past instances of misjudgement, and moral values of equality, inclusion and non-violence that could enable them to create a reliable alliance.

A certain kind of feminism can be useful in addressing issues of hatred and exclusion of people,? says the tall, strapping 70-year-old Cockburn, who was recently in the city for a seminar organised by the Calcutta Research Group. Not for Cockburn a feminism that views women as superior to men. Nor is she sympathetic to the ism that valorises women who want to individually climb the career ladder to get equal with men, uncritical of the world they are aspiring to join and neglectful of the women they leave behind. At the onset of the interview itself, Cockburn specifies her belief in collective feminism, a feminism that sees the world as bad for men as well as women and its institutions, not things feminists would want to control but dismantle and reshape.

A young Cockburn had decided long ago that she wanted to change her world. As someone who did not have the privilege of a university education (?my parents were disinterested?) she had started her career as a steno-typist. Quickly, she moved on to writing in newspapers as a journalist before she entered the hallowed portals of the university as a researcher before the Swedish University awarded her honorary professorship for her pathbreaking works. At the age of 38, she was a divorced mother of two daughters.

If patriarchy can survive a lot of angry women stepping out of line, what it cannot accept is men stepping out and allowing themselves to be ?feminised?. ?Some may criticise me for not wearing a skirt and hate the man in me,? says Cockburn. ?But what they really cannot accept is the woman in men, those who are soft and gentle. Men who startle traditional opinion when they look at women as part of the category called ?people?. This is because it is more important for patriarchy to maintain the ranks of male solidarity and male authority. The more women challenge male authority, the more important it is for the men to sustain their masculinity.? That is why, says Cockburn, society is more afraid of male homosexuality than lesbianism. ?Lesbianism has been treated as a bit of a joke but male homosexuality has to be strongly policed for destabilising authoritative structures.?

It is this commitment to collective action for change and her deep understanding of the social process of man-woman relationships that Cockburn uses as a resource to understand and counteract other kinds of identity politics such as xenophobia, racism or aggressive nationalism. ?After all, all oppressions and exclusions are the same,? she argues, ?and women, because of their social position, should be able to understand this best. Just as they are arbitrarily defined to be inferior, weak, emotional and labelled as ?not men,? similarly, Muslims, for example, are stereotyped and defined as ?dangerous?, legitimising repressive policing.?

The 1980s were formative years for Cockburn?s activism. In 1981, when the British government allowed US missiles into England without consulting the Parliament or people, Cockburn and her friends flocked to Greenham Common (GC), the military base, to voice their protest. ?Men have always left home to make war, let us leave home to make peace,? they said. By the next year, 30,000 women had walked several hundred miles to gather at the base and chained themselves to the fence till the government relented. For 15 years, they set up the vigil in GC in turn, with women carrying firewood, plastic sheets for shelter and food to keep up the pressure. ?It was very empowering,? remembers Cockburn. ?We associated our feminism with anti-nuclear war.? There was no turning back for Cockburn.

In the 1990s, when the new kinds of war bombarded Afghanistan and Iraq, the GC group renamed themselves the Women in Black (WiB) to link up with the worldwide peace movement initiated by WiB in Israel and taken forward by the activists in Italy. Today, many of the London WiB members go regularly to Palestine to work in solidarity with the women there. ?But we work with Israeli peace activists, too, and don?t get locked into narrow nationalist agendas. We help to build bridges between the two communities.?

Women like Cockburn are consistent. When they leave home they do so to wage peace.