The Other Side of War: A Lecture by Zainab Salbi

By Tausif Noor
Courtesy of The Economist


To summarize British journalist Anthony Loyd, the event of war can be regarded as the final frontier of mankind. That is to say, once man has established civilizations and settlements and a system of order to control these civilizations, he seeks to acquire more territory and resources through conquest. This realist notion of the mechanisms by which war is undertaken has been propagated and contested, but its pragmatism neglects the more human dimensions of violence. Zainab Salbi, founder of Women for Women International, has made it her duty to face the rippling effects of violence that touch the lives of ordinary citizens, in particular women and children. The nonprofit humanitarian organization, founded in 1993, works with women in eight war-ravaged nations in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Through a one-year training program, the organization give women access to knowledge about their rights and resources to establish their own agency and independence from domestic violence and economic disadvantages. Thus, the organization centers on sustainable development. Its goal is to facilitate a process whereby women can stand on their own feet and establish businesses.


Salbi’s Filene Hall discussion stressed the importance of approaching humanitarian aid and development through a system of mutual respect and empathy. Inspired by her meeting with the Dalai Lama, Salbi stresses that in order to help others, you must respect them. In the words of the Dalai Lama himself, “If you can’t respect those you are serving, better not to serve at all.” In her experiences working with rape victims in Bosnia and Iraq, Zalbi has learned that approaching situations with the intent of being a savior or a completely knowledgeable human being is inherently flawed. In order to serve, one must accept that privilege does not create the full picture of knowledge and ability. She stresses that most of the time, the people whom humanitarians are serving know the solutions to their problems and simply need help realizing these solutions. She relates an anecdote of how a woman from Bosnia wanted a microcredit loan in order to start a chicken farm. While Salbi was able to calculate the costs of maintaining the farm and benefits, she did not know how many eggs a chicken laid in a day. When she asked the Bosnian woman this question, she was met with a look of incredulity. How could this woman expect to help in a meaningful way when she didn’t have even basic knowledge that everyone in the community would? Salbi states that what she has learned from such humanitarian missions is that you must approach situations with an open mind and seriously take into considerations the knowledge that the people in the community already possess.


In order to take the advice that Salbi so urgently stresses, one must embrace the importance of personal development and personal commitment. Having an outlook of openness, and having the conviction that one can learn from others increases the likelihood that those whom one is serving will tell their stories. This is at the heart of Zainab Salbi’s discussion. For Salbi, who is a refugee and survivor of rape, personal narratives are the key to understanding development. She has documented the narratives of women from Southern Sudan, Congo, Iraq and a host of other spaces and collected them in the hopes that other women can live free from fear and believe in their own ability to better their lives. She urges that we cannot conflate the material benefits, like food and money and jobs, with sympathy. When she asked a Rwandan woman who had suffered from hunger and rape during the years of genocide what women truly want, what the agent of change truly could be, the answer was both simple and powerful: all women want is inspiration.


What can we take away from this simple story is that humanitarian efforts are much more complex than we often realize. Though structural adjustment programs from multilateral corporations and microfinance endeavors are implemented to assuage the flawed top-down approaches of development, there is much more to be said about the ethical and philosophical implications of aid. From the perspective of a feminist, war is brutal in a gendered manner: though the front lines are led by men who enact the actual violence, women play an equally significant role in maintaining the home and ensuring that there is relative stability for children. When women are excluded from the negotiations of a war’s aftermath, it becomes impossible to achieve peace in the midst of the destroyed, chaotic zone. And if Salbi stresses the importance of personal commitment and openness in addressing humanitarian aid, she calls us also to consider the human aspect of women and their agency and significance in international crises.