Feminist Peace Research

This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of feminist approaches to questions of violence, justice, and peace. The volume argues that critical feminist thinking is necessary to analyse core peace and conflict issues and is fundamental to thinking about solutions to global problems and promoting peaceful conflict transformation. Contributions to the volume consider questions at the intersection of feminism, gender, peace, justice, and violence through interdisciplinary perspectives. The handbook engages with multiple feminisms, diverse policy concerns, and works with diverse theoretical and methodological contributions. The volume covers the gendered nature of five major themes: • Methodologies and genealogies (including theories, concepts, histories, methodologies) • Politics, power, and violence (including the ways in which violence is created, maintained, and reproduced, and the gendered dynamics of its instantiations) • Institutional and societal interventions to promote peace (including those by national, regional, and international organisations, and civil society or informal groups/bodies) • Bodies, sexualities, and health (including sexual health, biopolitics, sexual orientation) • Global inequalities (including climate change, aid, global political economy). This handbook will be of great interest to students of peace and conflict studies, security studies, feminist studies, gender studies, international relations, and politics. Chapter 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This textbook provides a comprehensive overview of the field of gender, feminism and peace. It is based on the argument that feminist thinking is necessary to understand and analyse the core issues in peace and conflict studies and is fundamental to thinking about solutions to global problems and to promoting peaceful conflict transformation. The book centres alternative and critical approaches missing in mainstream peace research and brings forward feminist perspectives on traditional peace research topics such as militarism, peacekeeping, arms trade and the articulation of different forms of violence. It also advances critical and alternative issues and topics that traditional peace research has sidelined, including, for example, artificial intelligence, technologies and peace; trauma and memory; human–non-human species relations; art; popular culture; post-colonial and decolonial feminist perspectives; and the queering of war and peace. In sum, this textbook contributes to the visibility of these feminist critical approaches to peace research and makes them accessible to scholars and students interested in the subject. This book will be of much interest to students of peace studies, feminist theory, gender studies and International Relations.

"This textbook provides a comprehensive overview of the field of gender, feminism and peace. It is based on the argument that feminist thinking is necessary to understand and analyse the core issues in peace and conflict studies, and is fundamental to thinking about solutions to global problems and to promoting peaceful conflict transformation. The book centres alternative and critical approaches missing in mainstream peace research and brings forward feminist perspectives on traditional peace research topics such as militarism, peacekeeping, arms trade, and the articulation of different forms of violence. It also advances critical and alternative issues and topics that traditional peace research has sidelined, including, for example: artificial intelligence, technologies and peace; trauma and memory; human-nonhuman species relations; art; popular culture; postcolonial and decolonial feminist perspectives; the queering of war and peace. In sum, this textbook contributes to the visibility of these feminist critical approaches to peace research and makes them accessible to scholars and students interested in the subject. This book will be of much interest to students of peace studies, feminist theory, gender studies and International Relations"--

This book provides a feminist intervention in Peace & Conflict Studies. It demonstrates why feminist approaches matter to theories and practices of resolving conflict and building peace. Understanding power inequalities in contexts of armed conflict and peace processes is crucial for identifying the root causes of conflict and opportunities for peaceful transformation. Feminist scholarship offers vital theoretical insights and innovative methods, which can deepen our understanding of power relations in peacebuilding. Yet, all too often feminist research receives token acknowledgement rather than sustained engagement and analysis. This collection highlights the value of feminist analysis to contemporary Peace and Conflict Studies. Drawing on case studies from around the world - including Croatia, Myanmar, Iceland, Nepal, India, Afghanistan, and Timor-Leste – it demonstrates why paying serious attention to feminist scholarship prompts useful insights for peacebuilding policy, practice, and scholarship. Feminist theory, epistemology, and methodology provide a rich resource for critically analysing peacebuilding practices. In particular, the chapters highlight the value of feminist reflexivity, the contributions of a feminist corporeal analysis, and the significance of a feminist reading of core concepts in Peace and Conflict Studies – including hybridity, the local, and the everyday. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Peacebuilding.

Intelligent Compassion traces changes in the ideas and policies of the longest-living international women's organization between 1945 and 1975. Focusing on disarmament, decolonization and the Middle East, it finds answers to IR questions about the possibility of emancipatory agency in the theoretical practices of women peace activists.

Beyond the metaphorical use of healthy society as a normative goal of Peace Research, there is little engagement in contemporary Peace Research with questions of global health. Simultaneously, critical feminist approaches to the intersections of different forms of violence and health are rare in Global Health literature. Bringing together feminist Peace Research and Global Health scholarships, this edited book aims to enrich both scholarly traditions. On the one hand, the book provides perspectives from feminist Peace Research that help us to understand and analyse different forms of violence in the gendered realm of global health. On the other hand, the variety of empirical cases analysed in the chapters widens the horizons of Peace Research, in its understanding of what it means to study violence, peace, and justice in everyday lives. The themes dealt in the chapters of the book vary from questions of reproductive health, to non-communicable (e.g. breast cancer) and communicable diseases (e.g. HIV/AIDS), war-time sexual violence, mental health, therapeutic justice, domestic violence, and ageing and dementia. This text will help students and researchers alike navigate Global Health through a feminist lens.

The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda is celebrated as a landmark global framework for achieving gender equality in peace and security governance. Its power is visible in two decades of United Nations resolutions, national action plans, regional initiatives, and countless activist, academic, and philanthropic projects. Yet despite this vitality, it is haunted by failure, as a lack of political will and stubborn patriarchal resistance frustrate its promise. This book offers a groundbreaking critical account of the WPS agenda, exploring its evolution in relation to the wider politics of global governance and feminism. Paul Kirby and Laura J. Shepherd argue that WPS is not a settled, cohesive policy but a field in flux, defined and disrupted by a growing number of national, supranational, subnational, and transnational agents who in turn act on an expanding catalogue of threats, from climate change to homophobia, challenging traditional boundaries of peace and security. Kirby and Shepherd reconceptualize WPS as a “policy ecosystem,” tracing interaction and contestation around the agenda across levels from the UN Security Council to military alliances to feminist activists. They combine analysis of a vast dataset of policy documents with key informant interviews and close readings of diplomacy, statecraft, the politics of indigeneity, counterinsurgency, antimilitarism, human rights, and the arms trade across the first twenty years of WPS. Far-reaching and incisive, Governing the Feminist Peace poses a provocative question: What if we abandoned the idea of the WPS agenda as a unified political project altogether?

Moving seamlessly from the global to the local, from the politics of institutions to the theoretical apparatus through which we analyse peace and security governance, the contributions to this volume draw attention to the operations of gendered power in peacebuilding across diverse contexts and explore the possibilities of gender-sensitive, sustainable peace. The authors have wide-ranging expertise in gendered analysis of the peacebuilding practices of international and national organisation, detailed and complex qualitative analysis of the gendered politics of peacebuilding in specific country contexts, and feminist analysis of the tools we use to think with when approaching contemporary debates about peacebuilding. The volume thus serves not only as a useful marker of the development of feminist encounters with peacebuilding but also as a foundation for future scholarship in this area. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Peacebuilding.