War & Peace Quote by Jenny Shipley

Peace, in Jenny Shipley s formulation, is not the absence of gunfire but the presence of power. The line is constructed like a policy memo with a trapdoor: it starts with the bureaucratic ideals everyone is supposed to applaud "equality and development" then yanks the reader to the condition politicians too often treat as optional, or purely military. Her intent is corrective. If you build economies, pass rights legislation, and tout progress while treating women as an afterthought in security decisions, you are staging development, not achieving it.

The subtext is a rebuke to the classic post-conflict script: ceasefire, elections, infrastructure, photo op. Shipley insists that peace looks different when you are the person most likely to experience violence in the home, be displaced with children, lose bodily autonomy, or shoulder unpaid care when institutions collapse. A state can declare peace while women live in a private war. That is why her phrase "understood from women s point of view" matters: it shifts the unit of analysis from borders and armies to daily life, from grand strategy to safety, access, and voice.

Contextually, Shipley speaks from the late-20th-century turn in global governance that pushed gender into the center of security thinking, culminating in frameworks like UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace, and security. The line is also a practical political argument: excluding half the population from defining peace guarantees fragile settlements and shallow growth. She is not asking for sentiment; she is demanding a diagnostic upgrade.