In different parts of the world, lives are lost in war and conflict on a daily basis.  It would not be an exaggeration to state that many of us have grown desensitized to the horrific images and brutal stories delivered daily by the media from war-torn regions.  Everyday life numbs our emotional reactions to the brutality prevailing in the world; witnessing and hearing about other human beings being killed on a massive scale may become the norm by routinization.

However, the mundaneness of everyday life simultaneously has the power to normalize the attitudes that reject militarist discourses, which are always at risk of being reproduced in any post-war and post-conflict societies.  So-called ‘ordinary’ people, along with political elites, engage in small-scale and slow peacebuilding through their taken-for-granted roles and practices in societies.  My first book, Everyday Life Peacebuilding and Family: Motherhood During and After ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, intended to expand this notion of everyday life peacebuilding by foregrounding so-called ‘ordinary’ women’s day-to-day care role as mothers during and after the Northern Ireland conflict.  The book draws on my doctoral research at the Mitchell Institute from 2019 to 2023.

I conducted life history interviews with 28 mothers and combined with those who joined focus group sessions, I recorded the voices of 55 women who were mothers either during ‘the Troubles’ or after the political settlement in 1998.  My interviews focused mainly on how women as mothers maintained everyday lives by assessing and mitigating risks posed to their children growing up in a deeply divided society.  While a few respondents came from relatively affluent families, most were recruited from working-class areas that bore the brunt of the conflict.  I truly appreciate the kindness of the women who agreed to share with me, a PhD student from Japan, their stories about being mothers during and after the armed conflict.

My doctoral research commenced just a few months before the Covid-19 outbreak that drastically changed our ways of living and took the lives of at least 3 million people globally in 2020.  For Northern Ireland, 2021 was a year which saw a series of civil unrest, reportedly in response to Brexit and the Northern Ireland Protocol.  These conditions had an inevitable influence on the research.  What I observed during the research was the unsettling nature of everyday life for women with children in a society that is supposed to be at the ‘post-conflict’ stage.  Paradoxically, a number of respondents reflected that, as mothers, it was easier to manage risks in everyday life in the midst of ‘the Troubles’ than today.  Drawing on sociological discussions about risk, I argued that this illustrates that experiences of traumatic ethnonational violence in the past amplify people’s sensitivity to risk, which is already intense in late modern societies.  People become more aware of risks in late modern societies, where the traditional style of dense, locally based human networks loses its erstwhile significance in shaping individuals’ everyday lives.  This, on the one hand, means that people have greater freedom in their lives.  It is no longer necessary for many women to worry about the possibility of their children being caught in a bomb.  On the other hand, however, greater freedom in life may entail greater precarity.  In a ‘post-conflict’ society in the late modern era, it follows that many mothers have few people they can fully trust and seek help from, while there are ongoing and new types of risk that did not exist in their own childhood.

The stories shared by mothers with different biographical backgrounds were so diverse that they evaded easy generalization.  However, in the book, I highlighted two intercommunal commonalities shared by mothers across the ethnonational line.  First, while many women from the Shankill and Catholic West Belfast believed that they were different, their memories of everyday lives in times of the conflict were strikingly similar.  This is despite the fact that many women in my study remain deeply distrustful of their erstwhile enemy group.

Second, when I asked about their (grand-)children’s future, the respondents shared a consensus that their children and grandchildren should never repeat the violent past.  For this reason, which they take for granted, mothers in my study made efforts to keep their children and grandchildren away from ethnonational politics, particularly paramilitarism.  Many of them also chose to stay silent about the traumatic past, fearing that talking about it may pass down what they call ‘burdens’ on their young family members.  As recent research on transgenerational trauma reveals, this ‘post-conflict’ silence among parents is not a panacea to prevent escalations and future repetitions of violence.  Yet, it would be worthwhile to foreground how women’s everyday decisions as mothers, which are rare to be considered relevant to peacebuilding, are actually influencing peace processes at the grassroots level by changing how children interpret their world.

Politically, my respondents’ views were deeply divided, and it is never my intention to argue women as mothers are all pacifists.  My findings also revealed the intensity of emotions such as resentment, grief and grudge among many women in the ‘post-conflict’ context. Mothers’ stories thus simultaneously illustrate that many more efforts are necessary to repair the deep schism that has been created by the exposure to the conflict and violence.

 

Why motherhood during and after conflict? 

Women’s stories are less likely to be documented and valued than those of men in patriarchal societies.  Feminist peace scholars have rightly argued that war and conflict intensify patriarchy in societies, and the exposure to conflict and violence has a repercussive impact on the gender order in societies in the ‘post-conflict’ context.  My book’s one of the most important contributions to scholarship would be that by focusing specifically on motherhood through sociological research, the book illustrates the gendered nature of coping with conflict and their underappreciated roles in preventing escalation and repetitions of conflict and violence.  Upon the publication of this book, I reflect on the people in various regions of the world where conflict and war have become a part of daily life.  I hope that the ‘small’ stories of everyday life shared by mothers in Northern Ireland serve as hints for building slow yet sustainable peace.

 

Dr Yumi Omori

Yumi is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest, Stellenbosch University, South Africa.  In 2024, she was awarded a PhD in Sociology from the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work, Queen’s University Belfast.  Before undertaking her doctoral studies, she served as a Researcher and Adviser in the Political and Economic Section at the Japanese Embassy of Ireland.  She holds an MA in Conflict Transformation and Social Justice (Distinction) from Queen’s University Belfast, along with an MA in International Studies and a BA in English and Area Studies, both from Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.