Women, Wartime and the Dream of Peace

Zainab Salbi asks audiences to look behind the conventional image of war. Military history privileges fighters, weapons, and territorial change, while women appear as victims or symbols. In the “back line,” however, women secure food, care for families, preserve schools and markets, cross checkpoints, and absorb the violence that enters homes and bodies.

This labor is not evidence that women are naturally peaceful or endlessly resilient. The language of resilience can romanticize the unpaid work that war imposes and hide differences among women. Salbi’s political claim is that those who sustain society acquire knowledge essential to reconstruction, yet formal negotiations routinely return authority to armed men.

The talk links recognition to representation: telling women’s stories is insufficient if peace processes exclude them from decisions about security, land, justice, and public money. Read today, it also invites scrutiny of the aid organizations that circulate survivor testimony. Whose agenda does a story serve, and does the woman who tells it gain power over the future being planned in her name?