Any vision of peace must ‘grapple not only with war but also with continuums of violence and peace that extend from the home and community to the public spaces of international relations’ (True, 2020: 87). The contributing authors to this themed section challenge and enrich traditional conceptions of peace by adopting a feminist approach to peace. Feminist peace research, as Väyrynen et al (2021: 43) have argued, must be ‘open to untidiness, complexity and co-existing contradictions’. This themed section aims to engage with such complexity and untidiness by adopting feminist peace as a theory, praxis and/or methodology. Feminist peace aims to challenge systems of oppression and hierarchy, confronting patriarchal power and systems of gender-based violence and harm. This themed section uses the concept of feminist peace to contest traditional militarised and masculinised assumptions underpinning projects to end war in order to unsettle much of what we think we know about peace by revealing the mundane and everyday acts that promote peace and an end to violence (see Otto, 2020; Mackenzie and Wegner, 2021).
Research on feminist peace requires a more radical and emancipatory analysis of peace and war than conventional accounts (Berry and Lake, 2021; Väyrynen et al, 2021). However, feminist peace research confronts a ‘double bind’ between ‘nonideal strategies and ideal visions which loom large in feminist thought and activism’ (Bird, 2020: 180; see also Radin, 1990). Feminist perspectives and theory move between attempts at ‘resistance’ and acts of ‘compliance’ (Kouvo and Pearson, 2011). Tensions between these objectives are present in the contributing articles to the themed section, which respond to policy inventions and frameworks, especially the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. The WPS agenda was designed to address women’s unique and specific experiences of war, as well as the marginalisation of women’s needs and priorities after war. However, in practice, it often overlooks the ways in which intersecting forms of oppression and marginalisation sustain power. The WPS agenda is a site of ongoing struggle and contestation. Although the agenda breaks the traditional boundaries of international peace and security (True and Wiener, 2019), it also tends to reinforce gender binaries and hierarchies (Otto, 2006; Shepherd, 2008; Hagen, 2016), and to reproduce neoliberal capitalist logics (Martín de Almagro and Ryan, 2019) and neocolonialism (Gibbings, 2011; Pratt, 2013; Parashar, 2019).
Feminist activists and researchers have been working for decades to challenge entrenched masculine forms of power. The danger in transforming established understandings of peace is that the proposed alternative frameworks may be co-opted into the very same structures and institutions that they were designed to dismantle (Otto, 2010). As editors and authors of this themed section, we are aware of ‘how power sustains itself within institutions’ (Heathcote, 2018: 390) and hope that the critical and ongoing dialogue on the contested concept of feminist peace can help us to avoid co-optation.
In her article, Magda Lorena Cárdenas (2022) challenges the trend towards a monolithic definition of feminist peace. Instead, she centres women activists’ and organisations’ definitions of peace. Cárdenas argues that women’s organisations more closely connected to conflict parties define peace on the parties’ terms. By contrast, women’s groups less closely connected to conflict parties tend to reframe the conflict lines to advocate for a more transformative peace.
In Elisabeth Olivius, Jenny Hedström and Zin Mar Phyo’s (2022) article, feminist peace is a political condition ‘that allow[s] women affected by conflict to articulate their visions of change and to influence the construction of post-war order in the spaces that shape their lives’. They argue that the illiberal, militarised politics in Myanmar constrain the implementation of the international WPS agenda, as well as the possibilities for feminist peace.
For her part, María Martin de Almagro (2022) places social reproduction – a feminist political-economy concept that highlights women’s unpaid labour – at the core of a feminist peace. In her article, she analyses two Liberian post-conflict land laws as sites of struggle between a potentially transformative feminist peace project and the reproduction of inequality. She concludes that the radical feminist land reform efforts are too narrow and do not account for how gender intersects with other forms of oppression, such as class, age and ethnicity.
The final article by Sarah Smith and Elena B. Stavrevska (2022) proposes an intersectional approach to the WPS agenda in its interpretation and implementation. Their call for a different WPS agenda that attends to overlapping power structures and hierarchies reflects some of the key objectives of feminist peace research.
The articles in this themed section contribute to ‘the transition of social relations in the direction of emancipation’ (Wibben et al, 2019: 88). As feminist scholars, we strive to give voice and space to those most impacted by our subjects of study. Simultaneously, we recognise that those who should be at the centre of the discussions of peace/war are often ostracised by our conceptual categories and research processes in ways that mirror their marginalisation in real-world peacemaking and peacebuilding. Thus, discussion of feminist peace should promote better ways of researching peace and responding to violence and conflict in a world where the possibilities for non-violent resolution to conflicts seem increasingly limited.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
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