Routledge Handbook of Feminist Peace Research

Tarja Väyrynen, Swati Parashar, Élise Féron, Catia Cecilia Confortini, Tarja Väyrynen, Swati Parashar, Élise Féron, Catia Cecilia Confortini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780429656767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

Part I

Methodologies and genealogies

Editors’ introduction

This handbook, perhaps a bit conventionally, begins with theories and methodologies of feminist peace research, which serve as an introduction to feminist approaches to peace. It is difficult to summarise the richness of the arguments in the chapters. Yet, the multiple perspectives presented illustrate that there is no single feminist approach to peace and violence; neither a single feminist theory nor methodology. Rather, the chapters invite the readers to question many of the assumptions, concepts, theories, and methodologies by which peace and its gendered dimensions are traditionally studied. The authors also suggest alternative frames for theory and practice. Perhaps one of the unifying elements in this section is the authors’ pursuit of destabilising the binaries (e.g. peace/violence, men/women, theory/activism) that characterise “mainstream” peace research. By emphasising such skills as reflexivity, critical scrutiny, and attendance to gender power relations, the authors seek to overcome many of the taken-for-granted categories and classifications that characterise mainstream research.

In order to chart out new theoretical and methodological terrains, the authors ask critical questions about knowledge production; peace education and pedagogy; the embodied and experiential politics of location; the political and ethical implications of care; socio-cultural contexualisations; queer reconceptualisations of key concepts in peace and conflict research; and feminists’ vexed relationship with the law as an emancipatory tool. In reflecting on these topics, they suggest ways to challenge dominant narratives and claim political space and agency. The writers do not shy away from tensions in order to decolonise research questions, theories, and methodologies. Instead, many of them reveal how supposedly progressive or emancipatory solutions to problems may become part of the problem itself. Kiran Kaur Grewal, for example, highlights how the processes of liberal western peacebuilding are entwined with violence. They enforce the forms of domination and inequality that give rise to violence and war in the first place. Liberal interventions tend to be more committed to re-establishing the pre-war status quo than assisting with social transformation. In this context, Grewal asks “whether legal discourses and sites may hold unintended opportunities for transforming traditional gender orders” by reproducing conservative gender and sexual norms. In a similar vein, Shweta Singh critically notes how peace education may become part of the problem it tries to solve, if it does not engage in the interrogation of western assumptions about both peace and education. By leaving the structural and cultural forms of violence, including epistemic marginalisations, unexamined, peace education limits the scope of agency for transformation. As another example, Emil Edenborg’s queer feminist lens examines key concepts and assumptions in peace research and practice for the normativities of sexuality, sex, and gender which underlie them. By asking questions about inclusion and exclusion around notions of security or feminist politics, queer theory exposes the partiality and sometimes outright violence of our practices and theories.

In dealing with peace and violence, the authors in this section have developed self-reflexive approaches that pay attention to the specific contexts of the research and their ethical responsibility for the issues and subjects studied. Some of the chapters express strong normative commitments that are concerned with change, peaceful transformation, and even emancipation. As Shine Choi writes in her chapter, “the present global context is one wherein finding solutions requires routine normalising, dehumanising, reductive representations of life and intricate multiple realities and emotional lives.” This is exactly what her chapter in this volume seeks to challenge, by engaging, instead, with the complexities of everyday peace. Tove Pettersen, on the other hand, shows how contemporary feminist care ethics that considers care to be work is morally and politically significant for the attainment of peace. Care becomes an ethico-political alternative when its scope is expanded and it concerns everybody, not just the nearests and dearests. Farooq Yousaf’s chapter highlights the troubled relationship between traditional approaches to conflict resolution and feminism looking at the specific context of Pashtun societies in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He foregrounds the contributions of postcolonial feminism to questions of culture, tradition, and patriarchy in conflict resolution theory and practice.

The chapters in this section urge us to understand and revalue agency in the light of politics, and towards what gets structured out, subordinated, or made invisible in the gendered workings of power. In this context, the transformation, for example, of societal and political roles seldom emerges from above, but new forms of agency can be acquired by imagining and inventing the political anew. Similarly, Grewal highlights in her chapter how collective imagination is ultimately about giving meaning and legitimacy to practices and structures, and yet it is also a vital resource to help us move beyond them. Likewise, Pettersen foregrounds some of the features of feminist care ethics, which capture the fact that humans are embedded in relationships in which reciprocal care, mutual trust, and cooperation prevail. Acknowledging this type of feminist relational ontology enables new thinking on agency in questions related to violence and peace as we move away from a view where agency is considered to be autonomous and independent.

All chapters in this section affirm in their own ways that feminist, decolonizing theories and methodologies of peace and violence have the potential to produce new knowledges as well as challenge the traditional knowledge production practices that dominate peace and conflict research. As Annika Björkdahl and Johanna Mannergren Selimovic argue in their chapter, critical feminist analysis offers innovative ways to rethink problems related to knowledge claims: who has a right to claim knowledge and what is considered to be knowledge on peace and violence. Their answer to the question of how to conduct feminist peace research starts with an understanding that all ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies are exclusionary, since they gear the research towards certain aspects of reality and leave other aspects veiled. They demonstrate how feminist methodologies, including ethnography and narrative analysis, are embedded with such skills as reflexivity, critical scrutiny, and attention to power relations, which are instrumental for feminist peace research. These skills are a prerequisite to overcoming issues of epistemic marginalisation that characterise traditional peace research, as Singh also argues in her chapter. Indeed, Singh shows how peace educators from the global south have challenged hegemonic practices of knowledge production by establishing alternative spaces for learning and knowing.

Situational epistemology characterises many of the chapters in this section. For example, Annick Wibben argues that looking beyond predominant, often white and privileged, epistemological standpoints is of great importance and might help us uncover other ways of thinking about peace and violence. Choi concurs with Wibben when she encourages feminist peace research to show how the situated and embodied nature of our being in the world affects our approaches to peace and violence. Pettersen calls this view “epistemological situatedness” which grounds all knowing on temporally and spatially situated embodied locations in the world. Situational epistemology bears relevance also, for example, for peace education, as Singh shows. She discusses how feminists in the global south do not necessarily use the language of peace education that is scripted in the global north, but rather language that captures their situatedness as mediated by experiences of coloniality/postcoloniality, and where everyday life is marked by not only patriarchies but also intersecting identities of caste, class, religion, and region. Like Singh, Yousaf pays attention to the complexity of intersecting factors that include religious patriarchies, which shape the situatedness and experiences of female peacemakers in Pashtun culture.

It is pertinent to point out that the discussion on exclusive and inclusive knowledge claims and situated epistemologies has not been without tensions and contestations within feminist peace research. Edenborg, for example, highlights how intersectional scholars have argued that feminist writings can create new exclusions if they do not pay attention to ways in which gender intersects with other identities, including race, class, and sexuality. Furthermore, queer scholarship has questioned the notion of visibility. Namely the efforts to make marginalised groups visible and unveil their existence through critical research may be related to normalisation and depoliticisation. In other words, the attempts to produce greater visibility to otherwise marginalised subjects can create hierarchies between those who are acceptable, because they diverge little from what is considered to be normal, and those who are not easily included and normalised. Similarly, Grewal shows how the use of international law has been critiqued by postcolonial and other critical feminist scholars for providing ways of reproducing exclusive global national and racial binaries and hierarchies where other-than-white people are seen as needing protection. Ultimately, as Choi and Wibben note in their chapters, it is important to acknowledge how various tensions are a key element of feminist scholarship in recognition of the instability of categories.

Wibben urges us “to rethink how we study peace, whose voices matter, and which structures deserve our attention”. Her powerful conclusion, that “recovering insights from feminist scholarship on peace, while at the same time expanding the scope of whose insights count as part of this tradition, is essential”, thus paves the way to the future feminist peace research. All the authors in this section affirm the need for plural, attentive, and reflexive feminist methodologies that enable feminist peace scholars to examine competing concepts and discourses of, for example, peace and violence. Moreover, the authors also concur that decolonial approaches are productive tools to investigate subjectivities that are formed at the intersections of multiple identities, and in doing so help peace and conflict research move beyond dichotomies of, for example, liberal “selves” and illiberal “others”. Other future challenges focus on the need in peace and conflict research to better understand spatial and temporal shifts over micro and macro scales of local and global in order to examine patterns of transformation that are in the process of becoming. By doing this, critical feminist peace research can expand its frames into contested, peripheral, radical, and marginalised sites and give access to different voices.

In the first chapter of this section, Wibben presents a genealogical reading of feminist scholars in peace research. Her chapter, “Genealogies of feminist peace research: themes, thinkers, and turns”, draws our attention to several possible starting points for a genealogical endeavour. While the beginnings of feminist peace research can be traced back to earlier scholarly works and institutional histories, there was a veritable explosion of scholarship from the mid-1970s and through the 1980s, coinciding loosely with the UN Decade for Women (1975–1985). Wibben highlights how feminist peace research scholarship over the decades has had its tensions and debates, including tensions in scholarship and activism. She underlines that looking beyond official histories of peace studies and to materials we are unaccustomed to consider relevant is of great importance and might help us uncover yet another set of possible genealogies and new (old) insights.

Pettersen’s chapter, “Feminist care ethics: contributions to peace theory”, examines a selection of feminist care ethics contributions to peace theory while arguing that the cultivation of care is fostering peace. She reviews several feminist thinkers who have studied care as a universally required relationship for human survival, growth, and flourishing. Pettersen also addresses controversies and criticism directed toward care ethics. She shows how care ethics can be expanded to illuminate neglected strategies for conflict resolution; identify types of harm and violence that are ignored; and reconceptualise traditional and problematic concepts, models, and standards that apply to human interaction. She underscores that care ethicists are working for peace when they advocate for the fostering of good relations and attentiveness towards care needs, interdependency, dialogue, and collaboration in the private, social, and global domains. Ultimately, for her, care ethics and peace theory are intertwined, and the acknowledgement of this vital intersection is critical for the successful creation and sustaining of peace.

Björkdahl and Mannergren explicate in their chapter, “Methodologies for feminist peace research”, that feminist methodologies can be thought of as a rich set of investigatory and explanatory skills founded on the centrality of gender as an analytical category and organising logic of social life. As all feminist methodolo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• PART I: Methodologies and genealogies
• PART II: Politics, power, and violence
• PART III: Institutional and societal interventions
• PART IV: Bodies, sexualities, and health
• PART V: Global inequalities
• Index