Introduction

We invited Margo Okazawa-Rey to share the history, vision, and work of the International Women’s Network against Militarism (Network, also referred to as IWNAM). IWNAM is a transnational feminist collective spanning Guåhan, Hawai‘i, Japan, Okinawa, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, South Korea, and the United States. In 1997, a small group of feminist peace activists from Japan, Okinawa, the Philippines, South Korea, and the United States met in Naha, Okinawa, to begin addressing the presence of the US military in their respective locations. They focused on its negative impacts on women, communities, land, and water. This gathering, and eventually the Network, was catalyzed by the women of the Okinawa Women Act against Military Violence, which they formed after the rape of a twelve-year-old schoolgirl by three US military personnel in Okinawa in the fall of 1995. Activists from the other locations soon joined. Margo Okazawa-Rey was among the founders along with Suzuyo Takazato, Minamoto Hiromi, Yu Young Nim, Alma Bulawan, Aida Santos, Gwyn Kirk, and Martha Matsuoka, among others. The Network has inspired other activists and the scholarship on demilitarization; its influence is apparent within the articles in this collection.

Professor Okazawa-Rey, a founding member of the Black feminist Combahee River Collective, responded to our invitation to feature the Network in our political education document by sharing “A Feminist Vision of Genuine Security and a Culture of Life.” This vision statement, released in April 2021, represents the collective observations, experiences, analyses, and insights generated over the decades since the founding of the Network. The political education document highlights place-based specificity, illustrated in its attention to local languages and translation into Japanese, Korean, Tagalog, French, and German. It also charts how militarized violence, including sexual violence and destruction of the environment, connects various sites across these broad regions. Its authors insist that transnational and feminist work is crucial to demilitarization efforts across Asia and the Pacific. We find that it also illustrates a nexus that bridges the concerns of Trans-Pacific studies and Pacific Islands studies.

We feature “A Feminist Vision of Genuine Security and Creating a Culture of Life” to illustrate a transnational feminist politics of possibility. It is evidence of what can emerge when a small group of committed feminists come together—across and through time, space, and race, and who traverse the histories and structural inequalities of nation, language, class, race, ethnicity, culture, and age. The cofounders of IWNAM have and are continuing to struggle and dream of different planetary relations in combatting intransigent states that feed on militarism, militarization, and violence.