The feminist approach to gender and peace building

The article is situated within the feminist critical scholarship that scrutinizes the women, peace, and security agenda laid out by United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 and subsequent documents (Davies and True 2019). This scholarship argues that the mere inclusion of women and women’s experiences in peace building, the solution promoted by the United Nations, is not sufficient for the feminist approach to peace building (Väyrynen 2010, 144). The UN discourse on gender and peace building maintains a liberal model of peace based on a top-down, state-centered understanding of (post)conflict interventions (O’Reilly 2018). This approach is rational, instrumental, and problem solving, but it does not adequately question its own normative assumptions about peace and war. As a result, as Mila O’Sullivan (2019) argues in relation to the Ukrainian situation after the outbreak of the war in 2014, the women, peace, and security agenda can unintentionally foster rather than prevent war rhetoric and militarization.

As opposed to the women, peace, and security agenda, the feminist critical approach to peace building requires valorization (but also constant scrutiny) of local knowledge and local initiatives beyond the framework of the nation-state. It is also inherently intersectional, and it is committed to equality and inclusion beyond binary understandings of gender (Prügl et al. 2021). The feminist critique of the mainstream peace-building solution suggests that peace cannot be achieved as a result of short-term, project-based interventions carried out by organizations and practitioners from the global North in non-Western contexts (Parashar 2019; Prügl et. al 2021). A genuine engagement in peace building requires a serious reconsideration of knowledge production—what knowledge we rely on in a peace-building process, where this knowledge comes from, and whom it benefits. Feminist scholars criticize, in particular, “the fetishization of rationality” at the expense of “the explicit theorization of the role of emotions” in peace-building approaches (Shepherd 2014, 106). As part of feminist epistemology (Hemmings 2012), affect and emotions are important for feminist knowledge about war and peace (Shepherd 2014; Waller-Carr 2020).

Feminist activists and scholars have a long tradition of working for peace beyond the women, peace, and security agenda and beyond UN-related transnational spaces. Several women-driven dialogues across the lines of military conflicts such as in Israel/Palestine (Cockburn 1998), Bosnia and Herzegovina (Cockburn 1998), Northern Ireland (Porter 2000), and Turkey (Çelik and Göker 2021) have received global attention in feminist scholarship. While many regard cross-community dialogues as a genuine feminist practice for achieving peace, the efficiency and productivity of these dialogues, and especially their potential to contribute to the end of the conflict and conflict-related hostilities or even to achieve mutual understanding, are often put under interrogation (Cockburn 2007, 126–31; Byrne 2014). As Siobhan Byrne (2014) argues in relation to dialogues between women from Israel/Palestine and Northern Ireland, state violence, power asymmetries between national groups, women’s loyalty to their ethnonational communities, and increasing concerns over intracommunity politics may lead to a fading of dialogue, especially when the military conflict is protracted. Some participants in Byrne’s research importantly found it demotivating when the dialogue was limited to the most consensual issues, thus offering “a shallow commitment to unity among women and not a deep feminist commitment to solidarity” (Byrne 2014, 118).

The distinction between a commitment to unity among women and to feminist solidarity is important here because it is one of the key questions driving feminist thinking about solidarity across differences. I regard this theoretical tradition as an important additive to the feminist approach to gender and peace building. Ever since antiracist and postcolonial feminists started questioning the notion of universal patriarchy and common oppression as the romanticized belief of white bourgeois women (hooks 1984), many feminist theoreticians have tried to find the best recipe for feminist solidarity across national, ethnic, racial, class, and generational divides. For bell hooks (1984), for instance, bonding between women based on their common identity, or social sameness, is a gesture that maintains rather than challenges patriarchal oppression (46). She suggests that meaningful relations of solidarity, which strengthen “resistance struggle” (44), can only be achieved through facing “one another in hostile confrontation and struggle and mov[ing] beyond the hostility to understanding” (63). She regards dialogue and passion as two important dimensions of achieving “greater clarity” (64). This clarity is essential when considering differences between women and unequal power relations, which, as Judith Butler (1990) writes in Gender Trouble, “need to be first interrogated” to understand the conditions and limits of dialogic possibilities (56). For Chandra Mohanty (2003), analyzing and theorizing difference is an important part of feminist solidarity across borders.

Yuval-Davis’s “dialogically situated epistemology” of transversal politics (2006, 276), inspired by feminist praxis, has become programmatic for theorizing and practicing feminist solidarity in times of war or military conflict. Transversal politics begins with a recognition of difference—it is “a dialogue between people of differential positionings, and the wider the better” (2006, 281). The recognition of difference, or rooting in particular identities/positions, opens up a space for changing or shifting one’s position. This shift is epistemological—it presupposes that a dialogue participant is ready to know differently, to look at the world from another position. Since dialogue is an inherently logocentric activity, some scholars studying cross-community dialogues see possibilities in developing appropriate rhetoric and communication tools for achieving better understanding and recognition among dialogue participants (Porter 2000; Çelik and Göker 2021). Yet in the spirit of the critical feminist scholarship on war and peace, I suggest that in military conflicts, where language is itself a politically charged issue, affect and emotions can be considered an alternative way of “knowing differently” by feeling differently (Hemmings 2012, 151).

Context: The war in eastern Ukraine and Peace in Donbas

The war in eastern Ukraine broke out in spring 2014 after a chain of tragic political events. In November 2013 Viktor Yanukovych, then-president of Ukraine with pro-Russian sentiments, refused to sign the EU Association Agreement, which would have brought Ukraine closer to the European Union economically and politically. As the result, mass political protests known as Euromaidan broke out in Ukraine (Ryabchuk 2014). In February 2014 the protests escalated to violent clashes between protestors and governmental forces, which resulted in the deaths of about ninety people (Onuch and Sasse 2016). Yanukovych panicked and left Ukraine for Russia. In response, Russia annexed the part of the Ukrainian territory—the Crimean Peninsula—where Russia has had a military presence since the dissolution of the USSR. Yanukovych’s flight, the annexation of Crimea, and the political polarization of Ukraine led to internal clashes between pro- and anti-Maidan Ukrainians in other parts of the country, primarily in the southeast (Giuliano 2015; Risch 2022). In Donbas, the industrial region in eastern Ukraine bordering Russia, anti-Maidan, pro-Russian separatists managed to gain power in parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts with military support from Russia (Marples 2022). Separatists proclaimed their own republics—the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, which consequently divided the two oblasts into controlled (under the control of the Ukrainian government) and non-government-controlled areas. In May 2014, the Ukrainian government announced its Anti-Terrorist Operation, which officially marked the start of the long-lasting military confrontation between Russia-backed separatists and the Ukrainian state. Even before Russia’s full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, the military conflict in eastern Ukraine took the lives of more than ten thousand people. Up to 2 million people, among whom more than half were women, became internally displaced (O’Sullivan 2019; Gyidel 2022).

In February 2015, after the so-called Minsk negotiation process, Russia, Ukraine, and representatives of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics signed the final version of the Minsk Accords, which presupposed, at least on paper, a full cease-fire as well as a political process of acknowledging a special political status for certain areas in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts within the Ukrainian state (Cherviatsova 2022). The Minsk Accords were never fully implemented (Artiukh 2022; Cherviatsova 2022; Ishchenko 2022), yet they provided the grounds for diplomacy on institutional and people-to-people levels. However, peace dialogues between Russians and Ukrainians, especially involving the engagement of people from non-government-controlled areas, were met with suspicion in both countries, as my material reveals.

The dialogue project that I analyze here started in 2015. I call this project Peace in Donbas, but this name is fictitious to preserve the anonymity of its participants. This dialogue is unique in its gender structure—it is purposefully a women-only project. Peace in Donbas was initiated by four women representing four civil society organizations from Germany, Russia, Switzerland, and Ukraine. Two of them, the German and Russian organizations, had a long-term experience of collaboration. The main project coordinator—the German organization East-West Bridge/Gender Democracy (the title is fictitious, but the sense of the original title is preserved) is explicitly feminist. The Russian organization is known for its human rights work on local, national, and transnational levels (Çağatay, Liinason, and Sasunkevich 2022, 110–15). It belongs to the first generation of independent women’s organizations that mushroomed in Russia and the former Soviet Union after the dissolution of the USSR (13). It has a woman-centered agenda, but it is not a part of the contemporary feminist movement in Russia. The Swiss and Ukrainian organizations do not have an explicit commitment to feminism or gender equality in their agendas, but they are sympathetic to the cause. The general line for the decision to have a women-only project was that women’s voices were mostly excluded from peace negotiations (O’Sullivan 2019, 750), and women were underrepresented in other dialogue activities in response to the military conflict in Donbas. The organizers sometimes mentioned UNSCR 1325 as the foundational document for their project.¹

While it was women-only, the project never positioned itself as explicitly feminist, and some members of the project team resisted the idea of making the feminist agenda more present and outspoken, labeling feminism as a “Western imposition.” Yet, many of the principles upon which Peace in Donbas functioned were in the spirit of the feminist approach to gender and peace building. The project team cultivated the idea of women’s empowerment through engagement with politics, for example by encouraging communication with local politicians or by teaching participants how to search for information about political decisions and changes in legislation. The project also aspired to create a space where all opinions, even the most controversial and oppositional, could be valued and discussed on an equal basis. The project was appreciative of the local knowledge that each participant brought to the table and discouraged participants from speaking from an expert position. Also, the project’s longevity—Peace in Donbas has continued after the full-scale invasion—suggests that organizers never envisioned this intervention as a short-term, expert-driven solution to the conflict.

Moreover, in spite of gender homogeneity, Peace in Donbas’s organizers sought to recruit participants from different sides of the conflict with diverse and often incompatible opinions on the war. There were Russian citizens with clearly pro-Putin and fiercely anti-Putin political positions. There were Ukrainian participants from non-government-controlled and government-controlled areas of the Donbas region and from central and western Ukraine. Some participants from the Donbas region were supportive of pro-Russian separatists; others had a clearly pro-Ukrainian position. There were also Ukrainian refugees from Donbas who had fled to Russia in 2014 and internally displaced people who relocated to government-controlled Ukrainian regions after the start of the conflict.

The project participants were recruited through a rigorous procedure based on at least two recommendations from organizers and, later, from already recruited people. Therefore, the organizers, who were themselves civil society professionals with a background in academia, state diplomacy, or local politics, initially relied on their social and professional networks. As a result, many participants from Russia and government-controlled areas of Ukraine were so-called opinion leaders—journalists, academics, civil servants, local politicians, or employees and leaders of civil society organizations. However, Peace in Donbas organizers faced difficulties when they tried to recruit people of a similar professional background from non-government-controlled territories of Ukraine because many civil society leaders, journalists, and academics had left the region after the outbreak of the war. Thus, as Oleksandra, a Ukrainian co-organizer of Peace in Donbas, explained to me, they had to broaden their definition of “opinion leader” in relation to non-government-controlled areas and to “look for people who have influence, who communicate with their communities. And in this community [noncontrolled territories], these were doctors, teachers, and, as it turned out later, small entrepreneurs.” Thus, while the project managed to achieve social diversity among participants, this achievement was a side effect rather than an initial recruitment strategy.

The working language of the project was predominantly Russian. The language issue had been addressed and discussed several times before I joined the project, and tensions regularly emerged around it under my observation. Some (but not all) Ukrainian participants were predominantly Russian speaking, others were bilingual with Ukrainian as their language of daily life and professional communication. Most participants from Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland were also fluent in Russian and—more rarely—in Ukrainian. The dialogue was facilitated by four professional mediators—two from Ukraine, one from Russia, and one from Germany who was also a co-organizer of the project. Other organizers were active participants in the dialogue. There were also two social scientists—one from Russia and one from Ukraine—who, in addition to taking part in the dialogue, wrote analytical notes after every meeting, which organizers and facilitators used to move the project further. The dialogue meetings happened approximately twice a year and lasted for three days, on average. The first four meetings happened in Minsk, Belarus, to acknowledge the project’s symbolic connection to the Minsk Agreements. For security reasons, however, the project was later moved to Istanbul, Turkey. The meetings took place at hotels, where participants shared not only the formal space of the conference room where the dialogue happened but also the informal space at the hotel pool or the seaside, hotel rooms where participants usually stayed in pairs, and hotel bars and restaurants where breakfasts, lunches, and dinners were shared. The project also facilitated connections among participants between the dialogue meetings. Employing the idea of diapraxis (dialogue through action), the organizers supported small-scale collaborative projects initiated by participants of the dialogue.

Methodology and positionality

Since summer 2017, I have taken part in three dialogue meetings—one in Minsk and two in Istanbul. I was invited by Nadezhda, the Russian co-organizer of the project whom I met during my research about feminist and LGBTI+-activism in Russia from a transnational perspective (Çağatay, Liinason, and Sasunkevich 2022). The organizers knew that I had a research interest in the project and allowed me to combine my participant observation with writing detailed minutes of the meetings and providing occasional translation for non-Russian-speaking participants. I introduced myself and my research during the first meeting, and I asked participants to consent that I could observe the meetings and use these observations in my analysis. Therefore, my analysis relies partially on fieldwork notes that I wrote during meetings in summer 2017, summer 2018, and winter 2019. However, these observations were limited because, with some exceptions, I did not take part in the multiple small-group discussions organized during the dialogue. Thus, the fieldwork gave me a sense of the atmosphere and of some incidents that happened during the project, which are also mentioned in some interviews. However, the core material for my analysis is twelve in-depth interviews with project organizers and participants representing different sides of the military conflict. Three interviews were conducted in person (in Germany and Russia) and nine interviews online via Skype. I also attended a couple of online meetings after the project moved to remote mode following the outbreak of COVID-19. In the fall of 2020, the project organizers invited me to talk about the political upheaval in Belarus, where I come from originally and have professional expertise. I have remained in touch with the German organization and with some other project participants with whom I developed more personal ties.

At first, my position in the project was that of a neutral observer, and I was mostly seen in this status. My Belarusian origin and my work in Western academia positioned me outside the conflict. I entered the project as a volunteer who wrote minutes and as a researcher, not a participant in the dialogue. It was not possible for me to share my vision of the conflict, and when one of the participants—a thirty+-year-old human rights activist from Russia—asked me privately about my position, I defined myself as a leftist and a feminist. This self-definition was “returned” to me later by Stefanie, a German organizer, who explained to me privately that perhaps her anger and mine at some participants who tended to essentialize national/ethnic identities and, even more so, to stigmatize people from non-government-controlled areas of Donbas, came from our feminist leftist commitments.

As a scholar of Belarusian origin with feminist and postcolonial sensibilities, I was clearly opposed to Russian (neo)imperialism, including the military expansion into Ukraine (Artiukh 2022). I considered the annexation of Crimea and the military intervention in Donbas to be acts of aggression against Ukrainian sovereignty that could not be justified back in 2014 and even less so after the full-scale invasion. Yet, along with some feminist scholars and activists from Ukraine (Mayerchyk and Plakhotnik 2015; Plakhotnik and Mayerchyk 2019; Tarkhanova 2023), as well as some of my research partners, I found the stigmatization of people from non-government-controlled areas of Ukraine to be problematic. I also had an impression that many participants—from both Russia and Ukraine—prioritized discussions about state ideologies, language, and national identities over the material consequences of the war, such as forced displacement and economic and social inequalities caused by neoliberalization and the forced militarization of Ukraine under the military threat from Russia (Dutchak 2018). Admittedly, my impression is limited to the meetings that I attended and is not generalizable to the entire dialogue process, which has continued for seven years. In the spirit of affective epistemology on which this article relies, I used my initial reflections and feelings to make sure I did not recruit only participants whose views I sympathized or agreed with. Perhaps some research partners sensed ideological cleavages between us, and during the most recent meeting, in winter 2019, I felt that some project participants had begun to question my neutrality. Moreover, two respectable participants from the Ukrainian side did not respond to my invitation to take part in the interviews, which I regard as a significant limitation for my research.

Interrogating differences: Transversal politics through peace dialogue

This section sheds light on the importance of differences and intersectional thinking for peace-building dialogue. On the one hand, in line with transversal politics, I argue that dialogue should start with interrogating multiple differences between dialogue participants to destabilize an illusion of consensus and homogeneity. As Yuval-Davis argues, dialogue participants “cannot (and should not) see themselves as representatives of their constituencies (unless they were democratically elected and are accountable for their actions),” and they “should be reflexive and conscious of the multiplexity of their specific positionings” (2006, 282). Thus, acknowledging one’s intersectional positionality—when one is a member of a national or ethnic group but also a person with a particular gender, class, or generational affiliation—is an important starting point for a dialogue that ideally should lead to equality-in-difference, as “a priori respect for others’ positionings” (281). On the other hand, the recognition of multiple differences provides a ground for reconciling positions beyond the divides that military conflicts reinforce. Acknowledging differences other than national belonging or citizenship allows dialogue participants to find a common ground and to move beyond initial hostilities.

For example, some participants found it annoying and problematic that facilitators persistently divided them into groups along conflict lines (Fieldwork diary 2/26/2019; Interview 9, 11). A Ukrainian participant once said with irritation that facilitators ignored the multiple connections that emerged among participants across their countries and regions of origin (Fieldwork diary 2/26/2019). According to her, these connections were perceptible in the informal space of dialogue—for example, with whom people sat during lunches or dinners, something that I also noted in my fieldwork diary (Fieldwork diary 7/3/2018). However, during the formal dialogue meetings, facilitators continued to divide people into groups in accordance with the side of the conflict they presumably represented.

To a large extent, such a strategy from facilitators was understandable. After all, war is a fruitful ground for producing and solidifying generalized and stereotypical ideas about people from opposite sides of a conflict. Since Russia justified its annexation of Crimea and military support of pro-Russian separatists in Donbas by defending the rights of ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking people in Ukraine (Giuliano 2015, 514), it was also predictable that the question of ethnic, national, and language differences would be salient during dialogue. Nonetheless, by putting an overemphasis on regional (Donbas vs. the rest of Ukraine) and ethnic/national (Russia vs. Ukraine) differences, facilitators overlooked other important divisions, such as generational affiliation or difference in professional status or social class. The social grievances that led to the rise of separatist tendencies in the Donbas region after Euromaidan (Giuliano 2015) were translated into “the idiom of mutually opposed ethno-cultural identities” (Dzenovska and Fedirko 2021; see also Mayerchyk and Plakhotnik 2015). This led some participants, for instance Katia, an educated forty-year-old staff member at an NGO located in a large government-controlled city in eastern Ukraine, to speculate that participants from Luhansk and Donetsk as well as Russians were somehow inherently different, more collectivist and obedient, than Ukrainian participants. When I asked Katia whether the same characteristic applied to Anastasiia, a civil rights defender from Russia with whom Katia sympathized, she dismissed my assumption, saying that people like Anastasiia were special because their professional work (civil rights activism) made them by default more independent and more likely to strive for freedom. As this example reveals, uninterrogated differences produced stigmatization and stereotypes and reinforced divisions. At the same time, interrogation of these differences could have led to a clearer understanding that there were other divisions and, importantly, similarities among dialogue participants that could not be reduced to national or regional belonging. Acknowledgment of these differences could have allowed participants to be more conscious of their commonalities, beyond the categorizations that the conflict brought into existence or reinforced.

Ignoring the multiplexity of participants’ positionings (Yuval-Davis 2006), facilitators also failed to consistently interrogate on whose behalf participants were speaking. Were they speaking on behalf of their regional or national community, or on behalf of their social “bubble,” as one dialogue participant put it (Fieldwork diary 2/22/2019)? Elena, a pro-Ukrainian participant from Donbas, reflected on this eloquently:

In this extract, Elena criticizes the lack of awareness among dialogue participants that they often enter the dialogue as representatives of governmental or communal positions, not as individuals. In line with transversal politics, she wants dialogue participants to take part in dialogue as individuals, not as the “‘authentic voice’ of their communities” (Yuval-Davis 2006, 282). The way Elena disputes the authenticity of local voices also echoes the feminist approach to peace building (Väyrynen 2010). However, the task of undoing one’s ethnic or national belonging, or changing one’s position, is not easy (Sasunkevich 2021). In another fragment of her interview, Elena said:

In a sense, Elena’s vision of dialogue transcends the model of transversal politics. What she wants from dialogue is not just “shifting,” or an empathetic gesture of understanding the position of the other. Rather, she wants to deconstruct and change these positions by revealing the deeper affective processes and mechanisms behind them. Her reference to the language issue in the context of the war in Donbas is also crucial here. Unintentionally, she points to the core limitation of dialogue—its logocentricity, when language remains the main epistemological instrument to understand another person’s position and to reach mutual agreement. Yet, in this context, where language itself is a politicized and sensitive issue, dialogue can offer limited means of shifting, much less changing positions and overcoming differences. Therefore, I turn to the notion of affective dissonance and affective solidarity (Hemmings 2012) as a way out of this dilemma.

From transversal politics to affective dissonance

Affective dissonance is at the core of Hemming’s (2012) theory of affective solidarity. Hemmings suggests that affect allows us to know differently through feeling differently. She conceptualizes affective solidarity as an activity where feelings have an important political meaning. Affective solidarity is about “being moved” beyond identity or belonging, rather than being confirmed “in what we already know” (151). While affective dissonance is an individual experience, affective solidarity is a collective feminist capacity (150). Hemmings is, of course, not the first feminist scholar to speak about the central meaning of affect and feelings for feminist politics. Yuval-Davis’s (2006) model of transversal politics is also inclusive of feelings, since she conceptualizes “shifting” in transversal politics as “empathetic imaginings in which the subject attempts to position herself in the standpoint of the other participant” (283).

Hemmings regards empathy as paradigmatic for the affective shift within feminism (2012, 151). As the unique human capacity “to grasp and understand the mental and emotional lives of others” (Lanzoni 2018, 3), empathy is considered to be the basis for achieving mutual understanding and agreement not only on the level of personal relations but also in the political realm (Assmann and Detmers 2016). In the late twentieth century, empathy became “an aspirational value” in social and political spheres (Lanzoni 2018, 12). Hemmings, as well as Susan Lanzoni, argues that the power of empathy is in its potential to challenge “the opposition between feeling and knowing” (2012, 151) when feelings become part of epistemology.

However, while empathy has become a normative expectation for building solidarity relations in feminist theory, Hemmings (2012, 151–53) begins her project of affective solidarity by problematizing it. Two of Hemmings’s critical remarks about empathy are particularly important for my argument, namely the expectation of reciprocity in empathetic relations and empathy’s potential to reinforce hierarchies. Since these limitations contradict each other, a genuine empathetic gesture can become difficult to achieve. Reciprocity assumes that the empathizing subject and the object of empathy are equal partners in the empathetic exchange; otherwise, empathy risks becoming undistinguishable from compassion and pity (Assmann and Detmers 2016, 4). At the same time, empathy is usually given to those perceived to be in need, those with fewer resources and less power; in other words, empathy can potentially reinforce hierarchies because the authority and judgment “remains with one who empathizes,” that is, with the empathetic subject (Hemmings 2012, 154; see also Aschheim 2016, 29). To avoid this power imbalance, some similarity in experience between the subject and the object of empathy is required. Therefore, it is easier to imagine empathetic solidarity between, say, people who survived a war and those who live through the war right now, than between people who represent an aggressor and the victims of aggression, as is the case for Peace in Donbas participants. In this situation, the similarity, or equality, between empathetic subject and the object of empathy is unachievable (Aschheim 2016) and, as I argue below, even undesirable.

For example, Ukrainian participants expected penance rather than empathy from Russians. During one of the meetings, two Russian participants started talking about their personal guilt over the Russian state’s actions in relation to Ukraine, and two vocal and explicitly pro-Ukrainian participants nodded with satisfaction (Fieldwork diaries, 2/24/2018). At the same time, even though Ukrainian participants regarded themselves as righteous victims of the conflict, with whom other participants should empathize, they actually eagerly acted as empathetic subjects in relation to Russian colleagues, as in the case of Ukrainian participant Oleksandra, who said in an interview:

Oleksandra’s understanding of the repressive circumstances in which Russian civil society functions and her aspiration to help her colleagues are sincere. Yet, by depicting the situation in Ukraine as more favorable and hopeful and the situation in Russia as hopeless and grim, Oleksandra, who represents the side of the victim, also acquires “moral freedom and agency” (Aschheim 2016, 29) by depicting Ukrainian participants as capable of giving help and hope to Russians because they managed to build a better, presumably freer, society. In this sense, her empathy borders on pity, two affective regimes that are often difficult to distinguish (Assmann and Detmers 2016; Wiedlack 2019). Simultaneously, Darina, a participant from the Donetsk region, experienced a deficit of empathy from participants like Oleksandra who, according to her, represent Ukraine’s official position: “When people come from the region of the conflict, who live there, and they talk to people who are distanced from this [she explained later in the interview that she meant “the Kyiv side”], to find the common ground one needs at least empathy, that they recognize how difficult it is for us, that they understand our position.” However, Darina herself demonstrates a lack of empathy when she assumes that people from outside Donbas are distanced from the war, overlooking the fact that the war has significantly shaken the entire Ukrainian society (e.g., Marples 2022).

The examples above show that empathy is too contradictory, too power-laden, to be a sufficient affective regime for solidarity during the war (Aschheim 2016). For empathy to be reciprocal and on equal terms, some social and ideological coherence among dialogue participants would be required, and, as some scholars note, empathy indeed “is usually premised on some form of similarity” while “a strong sense of difference … blocks empathy” (Assmann and Detmers 2016, 8). Yuval-Davis, for whom “empathetic imaginings” are the foundation of transversality, notes that to make transversal dialogue possible, its participants should “share compatible value systems that can cut across differences in positioning and identities” (2006, 284). These shared values can sometimes be commitment to the feminist cause, as in the dialogue projects followed by Cockburn (1998), or this can be a shared understanding of the roots and sides of the conflict, as in the case of the Israeli/Palestinian dialogue followed by Shelley Berlowitz (2016). When the system of shared values is dismantled, there is a great chance for the failure of transversal politics (Byrne 2014).

Peace in Donbas was very ambitious in this sense because it tried to engage women with irreconcilably different ideological positions (Interview 4). Yet some project participants found this strategy not only appropriate but also desirable. Elena summed up this position as follows: “If you recruit for dialogue only people who share your convictions, what is the sense of a dialogue then?” Similar opinions were expressed by other research partners. And, in summer 2018, there was a remarkable incident during a dialogue meeting that shed light on the potential of ideological dissonance to shake the established grounds. A new participant from Luhansk attended the dialogue meeting for the first time, and she asked facilitators and participants for permission to show a short video about life in Luhansk after several years of the conflict. It is hard to say what participants expected to see in this video, but many stayed to watch it. It turned out to be a video clip about the rebuilding of Luhansk after the war thanks to Russian investments. The visual consisted of pictures of the city destroyed by the Russia-led military confrontation, which were followed by the pictures showing a restored Luhansk. Many were shaken by this intervention. One participant, an internally displaced person from Donbas, even came to the next session in vyshyvanka, an embroidered shirt manifesting Ukrainian national identity. Personally, I perceived the video clip as a propagandist gesture and expected that its appearance would be regarded as a project failure (Fieldwork diary 7/1/2018).

To my surprise, reflecting on this incident later, many project participants, as well as organizers, were of different opinion (Interviews 1, 5, 11; Fieldwork diary 2/23/2019). This incident resonated in several interviews conducted months after the meeting, and organizers and participants referred to it during the next dialogue meeting, which took place more than half a year after the incident. According to Elena and Darina, participants from the Donetsk region, this incident was striking to the extent that it forced people to rethink and abandon their positions, provoking deep and meaningful conversations among participants. Elena recognized the violent nature of this intervention because some people responded emotionally, by crying. Yet this affective disruption did not stop dialogue and did not alienate participants. Instead, it mattered greatly for pushing the dialogue to a new, deeper level, which participants like Elena and Darina were longing for.

Thus, in addition to empathy, affective disruption, an unpleasant incident or moment that provokes an affective response from participants and moves them beyond their positions, can be a powerful instrument in building relations of solidarity, as Hemmings (2012) argues. Her project of affective solidarity “begins from experiences of discomfort” (158), which she labels affective dissonance. However, as Hemmings (157) admits, affective dissonance does not by default lead to affective solidarity as a political and ethical practice of building communities of people “who have chosen to work and fight together” (Mohanty 2003, 7). Hemmings finishes her article with a recognition that whereas affective dissonance is “a productive basis from which to seek solidarities with others,” there are “all the different ways in which that solidarity is an unlikely outcome” (2012, 158). The mechanisms or instruments that can transform affective dissonance into affective solidarity remain opaque, if at all present, in her line of argument. In conclusion, I seek to show how this transformation can happen through organizing peace-building dialogues.

Affective dialogue: Transforming affective dissonance into affective solidarity

I begin this section by introducing two pairs of women with ideologically different positions who, nonetheless, developed relations of affinity during the dialogue meetings. In one case, the mutual affection grew into affective solidarity—a politically and ethically meaningful collaboration aimed at overcoming the consequences of the war. In another case, this did not happen.

The first case covers relations between Tatsiana, from the Donetsk region, and Bohdana, from western Ukraine. When I joined the project for the first time, I noticed the two of them immediately because they often spoke out during meetings, and their positions on the war were radically different. They were regularly in open confrontation with each other when the formal dialogue discussions took place. While Ukrainian-speaking Bohdana viewed the war as inflicted by Russia and Donbas separatism as a national treason, Russian-speaking Tatsiana did not support Euromaidan, and her position was explicitly pro-Russian, as she said in her interview. Tatsiana was a member of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions before the war, whereas Bohdana worked in the civil society sector in western Ukraine. As different as they were ideologically, both were active women of the same generation (fifty to fifty-five years old), burning for their communities, as Stefanie characterized them in our private conversation (Fieldwork diary, 3/7/2018).

While I did notice warm personal relations between Tatsiana and Bohdana in the informal space of dialogue meetings (during coffee breaks, for instance), the story of their unexpected friendship was revealed to me in Tatsiana’s interview (unfortunately, Bohdana did not return my interview invitation). When I asked Tatsiana in March 2018 about her biggest impression from the project so far, she said:

As this quote shows, friendship, or affective relations, between Tatsiana and Bohdana began with the experience of discomfort when they were accidently accommodated in the same hotel room during the first meeting, even before they started a dialogue that was expected to reconcile their radically different positions in the conflict. This experience required them to interrogate and discuss their differences deeply. Approaching this awkward, almost dissonant situation with reflections and irony, they gradually developed a sense of mutual attachment, which Tatsiana defined as “humoristic friendship.” From this affection they began working together on small projects, which the dialogue organizers encouraged and supported financially as part of diapraxis (dialogue through action). One of their projects involved organizing a meeting between people of a particular professional group in the non-government-controlled areas of the Donetsk region and western Ukraine. By doing this, they aimed to use people’s professional common ground to overcome mutual stereotypes and prejudices among people on different sides of the conflict. Thus, their relations became more than personal friendship; their work was solidaristic; it aimed to overcome the societal alienation caused by the war.

Another case is also an example of friendship, this time between Vitalina, originally from Donbas but living in western Ukraine as an internally displaced person, and Vera, a Russian participant. Vitalina’s position was explicitly pro-Ukrainian, and she was brought to the dialogue project by her friend Bohdana from the case above. Vera was one of the most controversial participants because her position was “of Kremlin,” as Tatsiana put it in the interview—she justified Russia’s right to intervene in Ukrainian politics and to secure its sphere of influence. The suspicion that Vera worked for the Russian secret service sometimes slipped among dialogue participants, and the suggestion was regularly raised that Vera should be expelled from the dialogue meetings. Nonetheless, project organizers (at least some of them) thought that her presence was particularly important because, although her position was antagonistic, it was also realistic since it represented the official position of the Russian state. This was how Tatsiana justified the importance of Vera’s presence: “Does she annoy you? But that is how it is. This is how Russia will behave. So, let’s discuss what to do with this. … That is why I want [her to be present]. Then our debates will be deeper. Perhaps, it will be more difficult for us to talk. But then what is all of this for?”

During project meetings, I never noticed that Vitalina and Vera were friends. Vitalina tended to hang out with Ukrainian participants, and I thought her position in relation to participants like Vera was of radical rejection. Therefore, I was astonished when Vitalina said in her interview, “I like Vera very much, … we are great friends. … I don’t remember how this [friendship] began, I cannot understand this.” “But tell me about Vera,” I asked. “She has, I don’t know, a peculiar position.” “Yes,” said Vitalina, “and we don’t touch this. This I like. She starts sometimes … That Putin is not guilty. … And I tell her, ‘Vera, you know your and my opinion.’ She is like, ‘Okay, I understand.’”

The relations between Vitalina and Vera were also affective—they were based on mutual sympathy, notwithstanding existing and acknowledged ideological disagreements. Yet unlike Bohdana and Tatsiana, who confronted each other and spoke about their disagreement openly during dialogue meetings, Vitalina and Vera suppressed their disagreement and, in doing so, they avoided unpleasant, dissonant experience. Therefore, their affective relations did not transform into solidarity practices—they remained on the level of immediate feelings, as Jodi Dean (1996) defines this type of affection. As Dean argues, “the solidarity of intimate ties,” which she also defines as affectionate solidarity, “results in the isolation of those within the circle of care from those who remain outside it” (19). This means that affectionate relations, or even solidarity, between Vitalina and Vera do not have the potential to extend beyond their circle, as the fact that their relations go almost unnoticed and do not result in any community-oriented actions confirms.

Through engaging with these two contrasting examples, the following conclusion about the shift from affective dissonance to affective solidarity can be made: if we are to transform affective dissonance into solidarity, differences should be openly acknowledged and interrogated. This cannot happen automatically, especially if people tend to avoid confrontation, as in the case of Vera and Vitalina. This is where transversal dialogue, with its mechanisms of acknowledging positions and talking through them, becomes particularly helpful. Yet, as I also show throughout this text, dialogue itself is not a sufficient means to build solidarity across differences because dialogue can reinforce positions instead of enabling their shifting or transgression. As the case of Bohdana and Tatsiana demonstrates, affect, including the corporeal and emotional dimensions of people’s relations, plays an important role in transforming dialogue into the desire to work and struggle together beyond differences in identities and ideological cleavages. Sharing food and a living space during the dialogue meetings, swimming in the sea together, laughing, and shopping create a level of connection that enables dialogue participants to see each other beyond the official positions that they take or are assigned in the formal space of dialogue. Therefore, projects like Peace in Donbas, which epitomize the model of affective dialogue, have the potential to foster solidarity relations between people from the opposite sides of a conflict.

Conclusion

When I was writing this article in summer 2022, while the full-scale war in Ukraine was ongoing, my major concern was how and to what extent all of this would matter in a situation where millions of lives were destroyed by death or forced displacement and Ukrainian cities were wiped off the map by the Russian military. In the end, Peace in Donbas did not manage to bring what it promised—namely, peace in Donbas and the whole of Ukraine. Instead, the regional conflict escalated into a full-scale war with still-unpredictable consequences. However, precisely as the feminist approach to gender and peace building suggests, the efficacy of peace-building projects cannot be measured by achieving peace at any cost. Peace building is a long-term endeavor, aimed at transforming conflict and preventing its reoccurrence, and at building nonviolent relationships, including social and economic justice, within and beyond communities affected by the war (Prügl et al. 2021). In this sense, Peace in Donbas, based on establishing long-term personal relations between women from different sides of the military conflict, offers a feminist model for reconciliation processes. The model of feminist solidarity based on affective dialogue that this project promotes can be applicable in contexts beyond the current Russo-Ukrainian war. For this to happen, I want to highlight some lessons about feminist solidarity in times of war that I learned from this project.

First, what I perhaps most admire about Peace in Donbas is that this is a long-term intervention to which the full-scale invasion has not put an end. This longevity explains project sustainability—it has allowed project participants to get acquainted and to build relations of trust and mutual attachment across the lines of the conflict, relationships that so far have survived the full-scale invasion. Second, the project is run with a great deal of care about participants’ well-being, safety, and comfort during the meetings. The organizers knew that some participants came from war-torn areas of Ukraine where daily life was challenging. Thus, they tried to use three days of dialogue to provide people with enjoyable experiences. While the budget of the project was limited, they still aspired to find nice accommodations where the intensity of dialogue could be counterbalanced by a pleasant atmosphere (a walk along the sea or a spa) and good food.

In my opinion, Peace in Donbas, or any affective dialogue, should apply the feminist optic consistently. The significant shortcoming of the project was that a lack of articulation of the intersectional nature of women’s experiences prevented meaningful discussions about similarities and differences among project participants that went beyond nationality, ethnicity, and sides in the conflict. The interrogation of these differences should be the starting point of a dialogue, in the spirit of transversal politics, but it can also be an important tool to reveal commonalities among participants and to understand that many of them are driven by similar fears, aspirations, and interests, as one of research partners, Elena, eloquently argued when she talked about the language issue in Ukraine.

Laura Shepherd (2014), a scholar of gender, peace, and security, argues that hope as a “profoundly political activity” should always be chosen over fear, “the only emotion with which conventional international relations is entirely comfortable” (99). The fact that Peace in Donbas continues despite Russia’s full-scale invasion gives me hope in the darkest hours of despair caused by the current war in Ukraine.