Introduction

This piece represents an interdisciplinary and transnational conversation, between geographically dis/located scholars, aiming to unpack the concept of peace, feminism and their intertwining as ‘feminist peace’. In this conversation, we engage three broad questions: (1) How do we conceptualize peace, feminism and feminist peace? (2) How does our understanding resonate with intersectional, queer, transnational and decolonial feminist politics and praxis? and (3) What political demands and/or justice movements could possibly emerge through our own and varying visions of feminist peace? To work through these questions, we have adopted feminist pedagogies that rely on a dialectical approach, through which we examine and interrogate our difference, and in some cases differing perspectives, for the purpose of collectively resolving and addressing contentions, around the terms and also around our own ongoing scholarship in the field of violence, justice and peace. Through this conversation, we find ourselves shedding light on different concepts relevant to feminist peace, including historical justice, capital, relationship to land, politics of care, self-reflexivity, individual versus structural violence, collective responsibility, belonging and identity.

This conversation contributes to discussions around feminist peace, in its opening up for critical reflections of and analysis on to whom peace is deemed as necessary, to the limits of community, activism and feminist organizing, and also to the limitations of conceptualizing peace in binaries, or as opposite to violence and/or war. We find that our conversation is part of ongoing conversations that are not limited to the three of us, but are rather interdisciplinary, and that also take place between friends gathered around kitchen tables. This piece draws on dialogue and lived experience based on our engagement with peace research and reflections on our work and collaborations, as well as the intersections thereof. Drawing on Black feminist research, we seek to bring everyday experiences into the realm of academic scholarship,¹ thus our transnational feminist conversations and reflections become a methodological and analytical tool in researching and understanding ‘feminist peace’. Navigating the complexities of time difference, physical location, geographic distance and different socio-political developments in our respective locations, as well as our countries of origin, added another layer of transnationalism.

We contextualize this conversation as part of ongoing processes and attempts to conceptualize a feminist peace, grounded in the everyday lives of many, particularly people in and from the Global South, as well as those affected by structural inequalities across multiple geographies. Despite the fact that this piece is bounded by its broadness, lack of specificity and word limits, we feel it resonates with those affected by structural and intersectional injustice and it reflects on the limits of academic theorizing and activist organizing. This conversation also highlights that although feminist peace opens up for conversations beyond mainstream understandings of peace, it can still be contentious if not accompanied with critical reflections and grounding in discourses of raciality, migration, de/coloniality, structural injustices and inequalities. By doing so, we aim to disturb hegemonic understandings and practices of peace, Peace Studies, feminisms, and the practice and implementation of so-called peacebuilding projects.

Hierarchies of knowledges

(SS: Sara Shroff; MA: Mahdis Azarmandi; NAA: Nour Abu-Assab)

SS:

I came to the discipline of feminist peace as an educator in a private university undergraduate classroom in New York city, where I had the opportunity to teach an introduction to peace and justice studies. It is in preparing to teach this introduction class that I had to contend with many of Peace Studies’ disciplinary boundaries, normative claims and strategies, vocabularies, knowledge frames, political and linguistic attachments, various feminist, postcolonial independence and decolonization movements, and my own feminist pedagogical ethics and teaching style. The more I read, learned and taught the class, it became clear to me that peace had a whiteness problem. This led me to attend to my reflections in a piece I wrote titled ‘Peace Professor: Decolonial, Feminist, and Queer Pedagogies’.²Fast forward a few years when I was invited in summer 2020 by our editors to reflect on feminist peace as a conversation with my close colleagues. I immediately thought of both of my favourite feminist interlocutors who work with, engage, challenge and disrupt dominant ideas of peace, violence and feminism. Each of us brings an important angle to the discussion of feminist peace: Nour, you as a sociologist and a practitioner in praxis of peace, Mahdis, you as a trained scholar in Peace Studies, and I as an educator in Peace Studies and theorist of gender and sexuality studies.Here are some of the questions I was thinking about – what is feminist peace? What are its contradictions? tensions? possibilities? Whose feminism are we talking about? Whose peace do we value the most? How does peace often get categorized, labelled and perceived as feminine? And lastly, how does violence become gendered and racialized in particular ways? What metrics are used to quantify peace? These are some of the questions I keep returning to. So, I figured we begin with these broad tensions and contested terms – feminism, peace, violence and feminist peace.

MA:

I enrolled in a postgraduate programme in Peace Studies in 2006, completing my undergraduate research in Political Science, Jewish Studies and a minor in English. Driven by the desire to work in peace praxis and what I used to describe as the ‘field’ back then, I thought that Peace Studies would provide me with the tools for change and potentially take me outside of Europe. Since then, my understanding and work interest has changed drastically. Today, I find it really hard to work with both of these terms, because both feminism and peace are contested terms. Even though I dedicated my academic research to peace, I am always questioning the notions of peace that we have, which exist across different geographies and times. Whereas the term has a particular genealogy, its emergence in the field has been very, very Western centric, and positioned in a way as an alternative to violence at a time when the vast majority of the world wasn’t decolonized yet. Whereas the conception of Peace Studies academically has been traced back to the 1960s, around the time decolonization was happening, I still feel I need to make a disclaimer: whose peace, and whose feminism.In my first week of class in my Master’s programme, two peers from Germany described having grown up in ‘peace’ and how fortunate that made them; I remember listening to them and feeling increasingly uncomfortable. As a woman of colour growing up in Germany, my reality of Germany did not reflect theirs. The premise for many, then, is a particular kind of feminism and a particular kind of peace, one which disregards that violence may be present for some and absent for others – in this case, how my classmates and I experienced the racial state very differently. Feminist peace is then often understood in a very Eurocentric way. Peace is often neatly located in the Global North, Europe is positioned as the cradle of democracy and by extension peace and violence is dislocated.³ So, it’s hard to embrace this notion of feminist peace and not be a little bit cynical about it, even though I like to think of myself as a peace scholar and feminist.

NAA:

To pick up from where Mahdis has finished, we all have different perspectives and our conceptualizations and the way we perceive peace are very particular and often subjective. Even the methods we use as practitioners or scholars working on the topic of peace, or peacebuilding, are different and are informed by our subjectivities. For me, my main contestation of these terms is around how these terms become appropriated, by the mainstream and hegemonic understandings, which serve the powerful, and reinforce hierarchies of knowledge and what qualifies as knowledge. From my experience, as a practitioner in the field of human rights and peacebuilding, conflict-affected populations, and thus my experiences with a language used in the NGO world, the majority unfortunately uses the term peace from the perspective of elitist political sciences, which is hegemonic, dominant and serves the oppressive systems we all live within and under.

SS:

Thinking about what you are saying, Nour, the idea that knowledge gets appropriated and then produced ‘formally’, and gets formalized, whereas other forms of knowledge are not acknowledged or articulated in the same way – I find it quite telling that Peace Studies has a white ‘founding father’. Why is Johan Galtung dominantly understood as the founder of Peace Studies? What about Franz Fanon and Martin Luther King, who wrote around the same time on similar ideas? What about other Global South scholars? And feminist scholars?

MA:

To me, that also reveals that there is an issue in the way knowledge about peace is being produced. For example, there are a number of feminist writers⁴ who have been sidelined in the canon of Peace Studies, because Galtung is considered the father of Peace Studies. Note also how ‘father’ and ‘founder’ reproduce both patriarchal as well as colonial notions of knowledge production. The language that exists around the position he occupies in the field is also interesting, because it is located within a Western context in states with legacies of colonial racial violence.

NAA:

This also makes me think of the importance of interdisciplinarity. I feel that one of the main problems with area studies in general is that they often lack interdisciplinarity. Peace Studies has, or peace theories have, a lot to learn from theology and particularly Islamic philosophy. For example, we don’t often see this in mainstream academia; we rarely talk about the importance of Islamic philosophy in theorizing Peace Studies, or theology, or how cultures conceptualize peace differently as well, and what it means to people.

MA:

I think Christianity has been foundational in Peace Studies, as Christian philosophy has primarily been engaged in the way we think about peace. For example, when we think of pacifism, pacifism is tied to Christian theology. But we don’t necessarily do that through other theological lenses. Partially because of the languages in which we think of these questions, because when we want to think about what Islam has to say about peace, we then resort to people who have written in English about texts that are not in English. This is a challenge for me, as someone who primarily writes in English and who accesses information about other places and other concepts in English, even if not exclusively. So, it perpetuates itself over and over again. This is also part of the epistemic violence that is largely unaddressed in Peace Studies.⁵

SS:

This makes me think about the coloniality of English. Yet, as we know, all languages have these histories of power attached to them. What is most interesting is that most religions – Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, Sikhism, Indigenous spirituality, African spirituality – all have frames and theories of peace for a lot longer than Christianity. So why, then, is the dominant framing of Peace Studies as a discipline Christianity?

Binary oppositions

NAA:

There is also a tendency to think about peace in binaries, primarily the binary of peace and violence. The same problem also exists within feminism, as it is often used in ways that reinforce this binary thinking. For example, the field of gender and development, and feminist peace, often reinforces an image of women as victims of patriarchy, undermining women’s agency and recreating this historical trauma of violence women experience on a daily basis. A similar image is also created when we talk about peacebuilding in the Arabic-speaking region as an example. Awful descriptions of violence, and stigmatizing some communities as inherently more violent, against each other, and against women in particular. Mainstream portrayals of these concepts are that some women need to be ‘empowered’, and saved from men, who are the perpetrators, and at the same time some communities need to be ‘taught’ how to live peacefully.

MA:

And to me, this inherent binary thinking about violence and peace does not really work, because it also leaves out the question of liberation and justice. I think in liberation processes there is a place for violence. Here, I am thinking of the relevance of Fanon to the Peace canon.⁶

SS:

This makes me think of the phrase that gets used so much: ‘peaceful protests’. Thinking about the Black Lives Matter movement, Indian farmers’ protest, the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement and how governments predefine ‘peaceful protests’, whereas governments themselves inflict the violence, and so the perpetrator gets to define what peace is. This also makes me think about what you said, Nour, the idea of the binary of victim versus the perpetrator, which also needs to be thought through, because in many ways all of us are implicated in the system, in very different ways, of course. However, the frame of protest as ‘peaceful’ or ‘violent’ is often defined by those that are being protested against.

MA:

This plays a very important role in the study of peace, as the image we project on specific communities helps us develop an image of ourselves vis-à-vis others. I also think something similar can be said about feminism, as I do think as it creates the ‘other’ it talks about, it creates this self-image of where we are speaking from and thinking from. We also know that terms such as ‘rule of law’ and ‘upholding the peace’ have colonial connotations.⁷ Resistance to colonial, to settler violence is then always seen as disruptive to the state of peace rather than responding to violence.

SS:

Recent scholarship in Black feminisms, queer feminisms, trans-feminisms, Dalit feminisms, decolonial feminisms, Indigenous feminisms are important to consider.⁸ They challenge feminist peace’s ideas of race, body, sex, sexuality, gender, class, ability, nation, categorizations and cis-ness. To add to that, I also find feminist peace very human centric. We are forced to begin with the human versus nature binary. This makes it interesting to bring land as nature, versus land as property, into the conversation. Indigenous scholars and critical race scholars show us that the discussions of who owns the land and who is considered human are not outside discussions of violence, peace and feminism.

NAA:

I also want to link this conversation to colonization and peace, as colonization has always been relevant to land, by way of changing our relationship to land so it enables systems of oppression to control us even further through the state system, among other structures of oppression. And I believe that highlighting affective ecologies is very important for us to be able to conceptualize a peace that is different from what the mainstream refers to as peace. This also brings up the issue of interdisciplinarity again, and how important it is to move beyond binaries and address issues through an intersectional lens, rather than compartmentalize issues.

MA:

We might want to think of Sylvia Wynter’s work here, as Linda Alcoff writes: ‘Wynter is right to argue that the epistemological problem must be central to the next phase of revolutionary struggle’.⁹ We have created this dissection over time. I would add that the compartmentalization of disciplines¹⁰ is a reflection of the ways in which we’ve also dissected the body. The concept of peace has so many layers, and one cannot neatly disaggregate it into a discipline. Peace has been so hard to pin down precisely because it doesn’t have a metric or measurement. This also reminded me of how intersectionality has been appropriated and is being used to analyze single units of analysis, as if these units of analysis aren’t mutually reinforcing each other, like the nation as a unit of analysis, gender identity as a unit of analysis, but the ways in which gender identity is understood and formulated is connected to these other forms of units of analysis that give birth to it.

NAA:

I agree on how intersectionality has been misused, but there is also this great Egyptian scholar, Sara Salem, who highlights and addresses this problem.¹¹ Her article on intersectionality is sharp, on point. She tears its use apart in a wonderful way, and she proposes that we cannot do intersectionality or intersectional work without incorporating materialist Marxist analysis, which looks at material experiences, and addresses structures of oppression.

Capitalism, land and nation-state

SS:

Capitalism is central to both the individualization and commodification of peace – peace as a reference frame, as a commodity, as a consumable product, as a marker of progress and economic growth, as exportable. Perhaps, this is best understood as the corporatization of peace. One example is how corporations will extract and exploit labour, bodies and land and then turn around and use philanthropic or corporate social responsibility initiatives to fund peace, corporate feminism, gender and development projects, transitional justice or whatever other international development framework that is currently popular, sexy and saleable. Another example is how peace has become a huge business in the self-help and self-improvement industry. The idea that an individual can achieve peace through meditation and that the individual can be a better, more peaceful version of themselves usually through consumption makes violence and peace merely personal conundrums to overcome as individuals and not deeply rooted and historically violent processes and structures.

NAA:

And this concept of bettering yourself according to this specific particular standard of capitalism is also a worsening of yourself in one way or another. The way academia pushes many scholars to claim originality does erase the voices of others. I think I see this a lot, for example, in work being produced about the Arabic-speaking region, and I see how this happens with the silencing of the voices of scholars of colour, or scholars that are actually working in the region, as their work is often used as data, and their ideas are simply translated into English and presented somewhere else. The voices of critical scholars from the Global South are used as descriptions to satisfy someone else’s gaze, rather than understand structural oppression.

MA:

When you look at contemporary scholarship in Peace Studies as a field, structural violence over the years has become secondary in the theorizing. Peace Studies separates itself from political science, as it pursues a world without war. The majority of research in Peace Studies, more often than not, is about armed conflict. It advocates for peace in the Global South and conflict areas. However, it does not address violence perpetuated in Global Northern contexts, where most people who write about violence and conflict actually sit. For example, Europeans think of themselves as peaceful people, despite the fact that just in the last 100 years, the continent has seen a number of incredibly devastating wars and genocide.

SS:

We can return here to how Peace Studies, or just the idea of peace, is so rooted in law and order and simplistic ideas of non-violence, so this idea that in order to have peace, you need to have some form of law and order. And we know that histories of law and order come very much from the coloniality of the police, militarization, the prison industrial complex, racialized criminality, and biopolitical and necropolitical management of populations. It is helpful to perceive peace as an intersectional issue rooted in histories of violence, slavery, colonialism and empires, where ideas of different structures to manage life and death have been laid on top of each other. Violence becomes this term that gets loosely used for certain people and not for others: so some people are inherently violent and then others are always already violent no matter what, even if it’s a peaceful protest.

MA:

The work of historian Richard Hill is helpful here.¹² Looking at histories of police in colonial Nigeria, he argues that this concept of controlling and having some kind of a state of law and order for the colonized population has never been really for the benefit of the colonial population. It’s always been for the colonizing population, as it serves to control and pacify populations, strip them from exercising political agency, rather than actually benefit them. This is why demands such as ‘abolish the police’ become important in this field.For example, as a person of colour in Europe, as the child of political refugees, borders and border control have been central to my lived experience. I always thought about the arbitrary nature of exclusion. Now that I am in a settler colony in an Indigenous context, borders take on a different form of violence particularly to Indigenous people. This makes me think about a friend’s dissertation on Maori sovereignty, Indigenous sovereignty in the New Zealand context. He argued that in order for terra to become territory, it needs to be possessed.¹³ Because for Indigenous people, land is not property and in order for it to become territory it has to be policed, controlled and its borders reinforced, which is only possible through terror/violence.

NAA:

I believe this is where an individual’s moral responsibility becomes really important, because our daily practices influence land and other people. As an Indigenous person coming from occupied Palestine, my relationship to land has been very particular, and has shifted over time. As I developed a political consciousness, my politics became less about nationalism and identities, and moved more towards preserving land and ending border control. I no longer want a Palestinian nation-state, but I want the nation-state model to be abolished. What I feel became central to my politics is unlearning colonial ways of thinking and being, and reconnecting with land.Colonized or not, we are all implicated and embedded in systems of oppression in our everyday lives, in our consumption choices and by virtue of me paying taxes to a state that provides support to armies, such as the Israeli army. We are implicated in these systems as individuals, and I feel that if we really want to reclaim our visions of peace, we also need to assess and look within and see how we affect nature, how we affect others and how also we are implicated in global changes transnationally across borders. So, my question would be: how can we, if we want to reclaim our collective agency, stop participating, or at least decrease our participation, in those systems that perpetuate existing structures of power?

SS:

I feel this links to what Mahdis was saying about living on multiple borders, and I feel that is part of the challenge. At some point, people needed a frame of authenticity, and a category to fight for a particular frame of justice. And, this was a political tool at that time to fight to have nation-states and end colonization, and as a political tool to a certain degree it did not take into consideration the ways in which we are so interconnected across borders. Many colonized countries used the nation-state as a model to fight colonialism, but quickly learned that the model did not work. Peace Studies, and feminist studies initially, took all of these categories and models as standards. Whereas some say that the system is not working, I feel that the system is working exactly the way it was meant to work, through extraction, with hierarchies, with categories, with essentializations.

NAA:

I think this concept of authenticity, and authentic identities, relevant to essentialization, is a postcolonial tendency. During the postcolonial era, some nations needed to define boundaries to get rid of the colonizer, they needed to define their borders in a way to also get rid of the colonizers, even though colonization has never actually ended. We only ended up with essentialist concepts of nations, nationalisms and nation-states, which more often than not revolve around ethnonationalism and religious identities. This is not to say that only colonized nations have these essentialist notions, as even in the UK, for instance, where the majority of people consider themselves secular, it remains a monarchy that derives its legitimacy from the church.

Care and radical reflexivity

SS:

This makes me think of the positionalities we share and occupy, how these shift and differing points of view that emerge due to that. So rather than thinking about racialized communities differing with each other, because of different locations, different realities, different kind of histories, this calls for us to be able to sit with that discomfort and differently situated privileges. As a Pakistani-born citizen, a settler of colour/immigrant in Canada and the United States, I constantly question my frames of accountability and responsibility to Indigenous land and communities, racialized communities and Black communities.I find the work of Nandita Sharma particularly useful here to think about how the colonial management of populations created the binary of native/im/migrant to rule and regulate.¹⁴ For example, the term that is used to define Urdu-speaking Muslims that migrated to Pakistan around 1947 are called muhajirs. The term itself means Muslim, refugee and migrant. So I often think, should muhajirs also be considered settlers in Pakistan? Is the term settler adequate? What histories, migrations and violences does this terminology erase, simplify or complicate? Given the violent history of partition, British colonialism and postcolonial independence, what role did Muhajirs like myself, who speak Urdu and Gujarati, play once they arrived in Pakistan? We need different analytics to map the ways in which multiple colonialisms intersect with contemporary nation-making and how we are implicated in these historic and contemporary processes.

NAA:

State systems are failing us. A majority of us around the world realize that the nation-state as an organizing principle has failed us, it was meant to fail us. This includes the type of feminism and feminist studies that is often being exported to our communities alongside Peace Studies and other disciplines. The Global South is where we dump our theories or validate them or, even worse, project them onto communities without much accountability and care of our own positionality, the long-term consequences and/or various collective justice processes that are already occurring in those spaces.I also feel that it is important to approach peace from the perspective of moral responsibility. As systems of oppression exist, we need to constantly call them out, while we practise self-care and community care that moves beyond political institutions, and that instead revolves around people’s well-being, a politics of care guided by emotional responsibility. I feel that we need to formulate a concept of a politics of care as a sense of responsibility that we feel towards the world, which also involves practising accountability in every step we take towards our struggle for justice. Unlike how most organizations define it, political participation is what we do with our everyday life practices, and not only through traditional political institutions.

MA:

I want to reflect on a very important point Nour made. I think this idea that we are only politically active if we participate in mechanisms of the state is deeply problematic, particularly due to the fact that refusing to participate is also a political action. We can draw on feminist theory here, and the notion of refusal as feminist praxis. Resisting and refusing to participate in something that is oppressive to you is political participation, and is very political. This means that we need to question the way participation is assessed. This also makes me think that thinking about peace within the frame of the state system and liberal Western democracies is stifling our imagination of peace. I’m not sure if I see today the same transnational internationalist global movements that we maybe saw in the past, like in the process of decolonization, even if they were framed through nation-states, I do think there was a global movement. And I often ask myself, what does that look like today, and what is the equivalent to it?

SS:

I understand what you are saying, Mahdis. But I also think finding an equivalent might limit our understanding of what constitutes a contemporary movement. I think part of the work some scholars are doing is coalition work, is movement building. Social media, both as a site of communication and knowledge-making, has dramatically shifted how information, ideas and issues circulate. I think that previous models of organizing society are not working, so part of the work of coalition and movement building is to disrupt, build, differ, disagree and continue to rebuild together.

NAA:

I also want to add that movements are processes that do not have beginnings and endings, where we are now is a continuation of our ancestors. This also makes me think that it is important to reclaim ‘conflict’ as a term. The way conflict as a term is deployed is often associated with violence and does not leave room for difference and disagreement. Conflict should not always be associated with violence, or synonymous with violence. In many ways, we need conflict and disagreements to be able to learn, we need disagreements, to build on each other’s work, we need to disagree to be able to co-construct. And this is, this is what feminist pedagogies should look like. This is how we should be producing knowledge, we need to be building on conflicts and disagreements. However, the way conflict is framed in the mainstream is always about ‘war’ and ‘violence’, while in fact not being able to deal with conflict is a leading cause of most wars and violence.

SS:

Absolutely, Nour. I often think about how conflict resolution is deployed as a term to think about solutions in terms of finality. I think a solution-based way of thinking is important, but, when solutions and resolutions become static and essentialist, they defeat the purpose. Thinking of conflict structurally, historically and relationally is far more helpful because it is always for continuous change, different and new corrective paths. However, central to this relationality is accountability, trust and respect, or even conflict resolution becomes punitive.

NAA:

Perhaps it is not about conflict resolution, but about conflict transformation. This transformation could possibly rely on processes of accountability that revolve around emotional responsibility, whereby we drop defensiveness, and instead listen and engage, as we become aware of our interconnectedness and embeddedness in global care chains,¹⁵ and aware of how systems of oppression actually play us and put us against each other.

SS:

This makes me think about how our care models are rooted in the violence of heteronormativity. This brings us back to relationality and so much of our understanding of relations is based on one of the founding structures of capitalism and nation-state, the biological family as a main unit of organizing individuals, care labour and everyday life. These relations are not based on collective accountability, but on duty and essentialist ideas of family.

MA:

This also brings to mind the idea that conflict is not the opposite of peace. Being able to have conflict is essential, as a prerequisite for peace is that you can actually sit with conflict, work through conflict and allow it. This also makes me think of the concept of ‘safe space’: there is no space that is going to be free from conflict and free from discomfort. So returning to the question of peace, maybe we need to be at peace with the fact that peace as practice is being able to sit with, work through, and transform conflict and tension.

NAA:

I feel that to be able to do so we really need to start promoting cultures of radical reflexivity, whether in terms of the way we organize and practise our work or even in the way we produce knowledge. I think about it in terms of embodying an ethics of addressing contentions and conflicts, rather than covering them up. This requires us to practise that radical reflexivity in our everyday lives, which has the potential to translate into something else, and, from there, we can take it to build movements that revolve around care and accountability.

SS:

I want to end by thanking both of you so much for your time, energy, brilliance and friendship. This conversation has been rich, as we moved from the concept of feminist peace to many others. These linkages have pushed us to think that ‘all knowing’ is a colonial construct, disconnected from spirituality, relationality, accountability and the interconnectedness of humanity. This conversation has allowed us to discuss how structural elements of peace and feminism bleed into the sensory and the personal, and to highlight the centrality of the materiality of life in our attempt to conceptualize feminist peace, through bringing the body back, not only the human body, but centring affect, everyday life and thinking about the structural.