ABSTRACT
Kofi Annan's emphasis on women as "peace educators,” indicates that they offer an alternative model, one that connects families and societies. Across the world and in different societies, patriarchal histories, ideologies, and institutions set contexts fundamentally hostile to feminist claims for equality, because these histories, ideologies, and institutions are structured on the basis of inequality. As feminists have long argued, security is as much a private as a public matter. One of the things that are important when thinking of peace education, however, is that the possibility of even opening up such considerations is largely closed off by the terms of mainstream masculinist perspectives. Security is intricately linked with peace, and violence is antithetical to it. Institutional change, bringing women into the public structures of policy process, is a concrete manifestation of the importance of their specific knowledge and experience to achieving peace, and affirms that public/private interdependencies are integral to it.
