Women and the 2003 US War in Iraq: A Call to Peacebuilding

On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the United Nations Women, Peace, and Security Agenda (UNSCR 1325), which articulates the distinct and horrific harms that war perpetuates against women and also recognizes the essential roles of women in maintaining peace and security, anthropologist Kali Rubaii shares some of her ethnographic research in Iraq with special attention to women. Her ethnographic interviews, participant observation, environmental sampling, and mapping in Iraq in 2014–15 and again in 202–24 are evidence that the 2003 US-led war in Iraq caused grave immediate and long-lasting harms to Iraqi women in forms including deaths, toxic exposures, reproductive hardship, loss of educational opportunity, reduction of social status, and post-war reconstructive burdens in a context of destroyed physical and social infrastructure and ecological degradation. Catholic theologian and respondent Elizabeth Groppe then articulates the thesis that Rubaii’s research is empirical evidence of: (1) the restorative justice due to the women of Iraq and their families; and (2) the truth of Catholic conciliar and papal teaching on the urgent moral necessity of transcending the practice of warfare, and the corresponding need to broaden and strengthen the Catholic practice of peacebuilding.