Georgia, the Tiblisi-based Caucasus Women’s Re-
search and Consulting Network (CWN) educates
people about gender inequalities and socialization.
Most of its representatives are minority women
(Reimann 2001, 41).
Global/local peace activism
Most facets of the peace movement of women in
Turkey and the Caucasus involve practical efforts
such as the networking of activists, the promotion
and implementation of community development
programs, and political lobbying. They also, al-
though less frequently, take on the form of public
protest, as exemplified by the activities of 100
Chechen women who blocked the main highway
between Grozny and Ingushetia to draw attention
to Russian aggression (Islam Online 2002), or anti-
war protests in Turkey during the weeks leading to
the coalition war against Iraq in March 2003 dur-
ing which activists, many of them women, held
marches, rallies and other anti-war events in
Turkish cities to protest at the entry of the Turkish
military into the war (Altınay 2003).
International concern for democratization and
the promotion of civil society has prompted sup-
port for grassroots peace efforts by women from
the United Nations, international NGOs, and
Western government agencies. Local women activ-
ists who succeed at the local level are frequently
offered support that enables them to ramp up pre-
viously small-scale efforts and to initiate new ones.
For example, the Regional Bureau for Europe and
the Commonwealth of Independent States (RBEC),
a division of the United Nations Development Pro-
gramme (UNDP), initiated the Regional Programme
in Support of Gender in Development in Central
Asia, the Caucasus and Turkey. This has provided
an umbrella for regional meetings such as “Women’s
Rights are Human Rights: Women in Conflict,”
which brought together peace activists from 13
countries in 1998 (UNDP 1998). Similarly, the
Women Peacemakers Program of the International
Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR) holds training
sessions for women peacemakers; in 2003 it con-
vened workshops in Armenia and Azerbaijan
(IFOR 2004).
Historicizing the peace
movement in the Caucasus
and Turkey
In the three autonomous Caucasus states of
Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan as well as the
independent northern Caucasus republics of the
Russian Federation, the legacy of former control by
the Soviet Union is profoundly influential. Kemalist
turkey and the caucasus 629ideology wields influence of a similar magnitude
in Turkey. These historical forces strongly affect cur-
rent peace movements by women and have yielded
a number of ironies. For example, gender inequity
and gendered violence are prevalent throughout the
Caucasus and Turkey despite strong emphasis
throughout most of the twentieth century by the
governments of both Turkey and the Soviet Union
on equality for women. Women activists thus are
faced with overcoming profound social barriers to
their leadership, but can simultaneously appeal to
egalitarian discourses already familiar to their
hearers. Similarly, the Soviet system, which yielded
an increase in women’s literacy from 10 percent in
1926 to around 100 percent in the 1960s (Akiner
2000, 124), gave women in the Caucasus the edu-
cational background they would later need for
organizing in new political environments that are in
large part more tolerant of grassroots activism than
were the Soviets. However, without the lifting of
centralized, imposed Soviet control, many of the
current conflicts against which peace activists cam-
paign might not have occurred in the first place
(Cornell 1997).
While many of the conflicts in Turkey and the
Caucasus have taken on a new character during the
past two decades, in nearly every case the etiology
of hostilities can be traced to at least the early twen-
tieth century. For example the Turkish state’s aspi-
rations to mono-ethnicity, which belie the ethnic
diversity found in it (Andrews 1989), have been
strong since its founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
espoused them. Ethnic conflicts in Turkey and its
Ottoman predecessor state have taken place on a
variety of scales, the grandest being between Turks
and Armenians during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, and the state and the PKK
(Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, Kurdistan Workers’
Party), a Kurdish rebel movement that carried out
a violent campaign against the state during the
1980s and 1990s. Women in Turkey have consis-
tently stepped forward to oppose violence as a solu-
tion. Peace Mothers Initiative was founded during
the PKK war by mothers of PKK fighters. Its mem-
bers called upon both parties to end the conflict
(÷stanbul Sosyal Forumu 2004); some have report-
edly endured torture (Amnesty International 2000).
The Turkish Mothers Association, an association
founded in 1959 which focuses on the advance-
ment of women and children (Turkish Mothers
Association 1998), also called for an end to the
PKK conflict.
Enmity between Turkic and Armenian peoples
has a long history in the Caucasus as well as in
Turkey itself. A major clash took place in Baku in