The Space Between Us

In The Space Between Us, Cynthia Cockburn studies three women’s projects that sustained cooperation across violent national divisions: the Women’s Support Network in Belfast, Bat Shalom among Israeli Jewish and Palestinian women, and the Medica therapy centre in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Her comparative fieldwork asks a deceptively difficult question: how do people make democracy out of difference when collective identities have been organized through fear, bereavement, territorial claims, and armed conflict? Photographs, interviews, organizational histories, and close observation keep the analysis anchored in the ordinary labor through which meetings are convened, language negotiated, and trust repeatedly repaired.

Cockburn rejects two easy answers. Peace does not require women to abandon national, ethnic, or religious identities in favor of a supposedly universal sisterhood; nor does respecting difference mean treating every identity claim as politically innocent. The groups create a provisional space in which participants can acknowledge unequal power, question nationalism’s gendered demands, and remain in relation without pretending to be the same. This makes peace work a material and emotional practice rather than a feminine moral essence. Women’s cooperation is politically significant precisely because it is difficult, internally contested, and carried out against institutions that reward separation.

The case studies do not provide a portable formula, and the language of bridge-building can obscure asymmetry if reconciliation is valued above justice. Cockburn’s strength is that she keeps this danger visible: dialogue matters only when it permits power, responsibility, and incompatible memories to be argued over. For FemRes, the book connects feminist security studies with coalition politics and democratic theory. It shows that the “space between” groups is neither emptiness nor automatic common ground; it is infrastructure made through time, care, disagreement, and the refusal to let militarized identities monopolize political imagination.