Cynthia Cockburn's blog.

How great is the internet. It used to be quite difficult to locate Cynthia Cockburn's work online even through university websites pre the days of blog. And now she has her own website/ blog at http://www.cynthiacockburn.org/

Cockburn is both scholar and activist, politically involved in Women in Black against War and in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. These days her research and writing is, as you might know, very much on women and/in peace movements, feminists as anti-militarists, but I first came across it in another genre - gender / labour process - 15 years back during my PhD historical research on, inter alia, women in the printing industry. Cockburn's book re male domination in the UK printing industry - Brothers: Machinery of Dominance (1983) - was a thunderbolt on gender-labour relations in an industry that, pre the take-over by computer publishing, combined craft/ technical skills and manufacturing.

She has an extraordinary and creative facility for persuading people to talk, for listening, and then for writing the detail in a style both direct and vivid. Her cumulative feast of projects has taken in women's peace activities in various states in Europe and the Middle East; she describes her forthcoming book (next month, 2012) Antimilitarism: Political and Gender Dynamics of Movements as  'a study of antiwar, antimilitarist and peace movements in several countries and contexts'. The Space Between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict (1998) investigated women’s projects of cooperation in Northern Ireland, Bosnia-Herzogovina and Israel/Palestine in the 90s. It's fascinating stuff, including re the differences between the national cohorts of women which derive from differing cultures, experiences, and immediacy of political urgencies. And - she has been published in Turkish, Georgian, Spanish, Bosnian, Greek, Russian, Korean and German. Now That is being accessible.