The Space Between Us

In The Space Between Us, Cynthia Cockburn compares three women’s projects working across conflict boundaries: the Women’s Support Network in Belfast, Bat Shalom among Israeli Jewish and Palestinian women, and the Medica Women’s Therapy Centre in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The title does not treat division as an empty gap waiting to be filled. It poses a political question: when national belonging, religious identity, and memories of violence shape people’s lives, how can they work together without pretending to be the same? The publisher describes a study built through words, photographs, and close involvement with these projects, examining gender, nationalism, and democratic difference.

This is not an argument that women are naturally peaceful. Its interest lies in the practices that make cooperation possible: who can enter a conversation, which terms can be negotiated, and which memories cannot simply be reconciled. Belfast, Israel/Palestine, and Bosnia-Herzegovina are not interchangeable cases. Read comparatively, they show how collective identities enter women’s political choices while particular organizations try to preserve room for action beyond the logic of separation. Peace moves from an abstract ideal to the labor of meetings, relationships, and repeated negotiation.

That cooperation does not require women to abandon national, ethnic, or religious identities, nor does it make every identity claim harmless. Folding participants with unequal positions into a frictionless “sisterhood” can hide asymmetry; treating identity boundaries as uncrossable makes coalition impossible. Cockburn’s problem is how to stay between these simplifications: recognize where each person stands while allowing the group to question nationalism’s demands around gender, loyalty, and belonging.

Nor should the three projects be packaged as a success story that moves neatly from dialogue to reconciliation. In her later essay “When Is Peace?”, Cockburn revisits women and organizations she encountered earlier and asks what followed the peace accords. That return cautions against assuming that a ceasefire or political settlement automatically delivers women’s hopes for safety and democracy. Communication matters, but when responsibility, violence, and inequality are kept outside the conversation, “bridge-building” can become another demand that those harmed reconcile first.

Read this book alongside Cockburn’s later From Where We Stand, which widens the lens from three conflict settings to women’s anti-war activism across a broader international field. Together, they offer not a peacebuilding manual but a set of questions: Who defines the conflict? Who performs the labor of repairing relationships? Which power relations persist after an agreement? The “space between us” is political infrastructure that has to be maintained and tested against justice—not automatic common ground.

The book’s method also complicates what counts as evidence in peace studies. Formal agreements can be dated, but the work of living with their consequences is visible in organizations, relationships, and the terms people can safely use. Cockburn’s close attention to women’s projects shifts the scale from negotiators to participants without suggesting that women alone can repair structural violence. That distinction matters because bridge-building can be romanticized: contact is not equal, and meetings cannot substitute for material accountability. Her later post-accord essay makes the book’s comparison temporal as well as geographical, asking readers to test a project’s promises against what becomes possible after political arrangements change. This does not presume that the groups failed; it refuses to let a conversation or a signed agreement decide on women’s behalf that peace has arrived.

The photographs matter not as neutral proof of reconciliation but as part of this situated record. Images can make the conditions of organizing visible while still raising the question of who chooses the frame and what remains outside it; they are most useful beside participants’ accounts, not as a substitute for them.

Sources: Bloomsbury / Zed Books edition and contents · Cynthia Cockburn, “When Is Peace? Women’s Post-Accord Experiences in Three Countries”.