Feminist Interventions in Critical Peace and Conflict Studies

Laura McLeod, Maria O'Reilly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367773328
• eBook ISBN: 9781000395228
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & 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.

Mundane peace and the politics of vulnerability: a nonsolid feminist research agenda

Tarja Väyrynen

ABSTRACT

This article draws on critical feminist theorising and post-colonial theories of the body, relatedness, vulnerability and the everyday to offer an alternative framing of peace and suggest a new research agenda. Although there are multiple ontologies in feminist peace theory, the concern for marginalisation and the understanding of the relational and vulnerable nature of human existence are the key contributions that enable a new take on mundane practices of peace. The article argues that traditional ways of thinking about peace ignore the notion that peace is best studied as an event that arises within mundane and corporeal encounters. Furthermore, the article provides a novel take on eventness that centers peace in the lives of ordinary people, and develops the concept of choreography as a means to grasp the richness and fluidity of the everyday techniques of interaction that are relevant for peace.

Introduction

In this article, I draw on critical feminist theorising of the body, relatedness, vulnerability and the everyday to offer an alternative framing of peace and suggest a new research agenda. Furthermore, I provide a novel construct of eventness by which I center peace in the lives of ordinary people. I also introduce the concept of choreography to grasp the richness and fluidity of the everyday techniques of interaction that are relevant for peace. Ultimately, I propose a critical research agenda whose ambition is to re-theorise peace by locating it within social and political contexts and examining the practices and eventness of mundane peace, thereby defying the dominant non-situated and abstract conceptions of peace. This proposal is a critical response to the abstract and ontologically solid nature of peace approaches in general, as well as to the limited way in which critical peace approaches seek to theorise the local as an antidote to abstractions.

My aim is to demonstrate that the microsociology of corporeality, vulnerability and relatedness enables a renewed grasp of the study of peace. The research agenda I suggest departs radically company from the mainstream – in which peace is conceptualised as abstract, solid or the ‘opposite of violence’ – by locating the substantial and situated nature of peace within social and political life. Ultimately, the agenda seeks to cultivate – in the spirit of non-representational theory, which goes beyond representation and focuses on embodied experience – an affinity for the analysis of ‘events, practices, assemblages, structures of feeling, and the backgrounds of everyday life against which relations unfold in their myriad potentials’.¹ To accomplish this, I introduce a phenomenological register that moves away from totalising perspectives towards microsociological approaches and an examination of the mundane practices where lived experience offers a rich fabric of corporeal presence, relationality and affect. I argue that the radical and transformative aspects of everyday life can be examined by exposing the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary and therewith the transformative potential embedded in the everyday.

Studying peace as a mundane practice

In philosophy, international relations, and peace and conflict studies, peace has seldom been theorised in ways that would contextualise it – which is to say, socially and politically situate it. Nor has peace been discussed without it becoming an auxiliary concept of war or conflict. Peace often seems to be an elusive concept, which is deployed to ‘bludgeon humanity with its extraordinariness, forever out of reach, illusive by definition, a dream too flatteringly sweet to be substantial’, as described by Rose Mary Shinko,² or a concept so ontologically solid and attached to war that no debate beyond theorising violence is required, as Oliver Richmond³ argues. It is this perceived extraordinariness and ontological solidness of peace, as well as its coupling with war and violence, that my article seeks to challenge. In my view, not even the Galtungian-inspired conceptualisations of positive and negative peace break fully with solidity and bring peace and its myriad forms back to the sphere of everyday life.⁴ I seek to contest the views in which peace is removed from its corporeality, experienced qualities and everydayness – and therefore from its mundane visibility.

I establish the foundations of my argument not only on the phenomenological orientation (which is discussed further below), but also on feminist peace and conflict studies, which emphasise the relationality of human existence. To elaborate the importance of the body and its relationality for the study of peace, this article draws from those strains of feminist and post-colonial theorising⁵ that are marked by a strong commitment to both corporeality and to the everyday. I argue that the mainstream theorising of peace, particularly as presented in the gatekeeper journals the Journal of Peace Research and the Journal of Conflict Resolution, has dismissed this tradition and hardly ever acknowledged feminist or post-colonial knowledge claims.⁶ By drawing from early feminist peace and conflict studies, post-colonial theory, feminist theorising on vulnerability and critical theorising on the everyday, the proposed agenda brings forth the sensuous, embodied, non-cognitive, pre-intentional and common-sensical nature of everyday life as well as the lived experience of conflict, violence, peace and peacebuilding. In sum, I will argue that peace is an event that comes into being through mundane and corporeal encounters.

The everyday life that I suggest be studied is the world of shared typifications and cultural material. It is also a world in which the subject has a living presence through and in her body. In the phenomenological tradition, Edmund Husserl considered the body the zero point of our orientation, the point around which our world is centred.⁷ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, emphasised that we gain access to the world through the body, and hence our experience of the everyday depends upon a ‘lived body’.⁸ In this vein of thought, the symbolic order is constituted through the body, as the body’s being-in-the-world is at once mediated through both physical embodied presence and cultural meanings.⁹ Both our living presence as sentient beings and our apprehension of the symbolic actualises in our bodies – or rather, in our relational bodies, as the body is always already in relation to other bodies.

The study of the relational body and the mundane practices of peace require, in my view, research approaches and designs that appreciate the complexity of corporeal existence and encounters. In order to understand the workings of power, institutions and bodies, I use a methodology of diffractive reading, in which new insights are built by carefully reading for differences that matter, while recognising that at the core of the analysis is ethics.¹⁰ Diffractive reading enables the reader to determine where problematic reductions and assimilations of difference have taken place. By using a diffractive reading strategy, the researcher can engage with different disciplinary practices and blur the boundaries between different disciplines and theories. In addition to its emphasis on difference, the diffractive method also implies a ‘curiosity’¹¹ on the part of the researcher: it requires cura – that is, care, concern and attention to detail. Curiosity calls for immersing oneself in a variety of research material, including interviews, life stories, visual materials and faithful descriptive works. The curious interest in the details of how individuals and groups interact allows researchers, as Robert Latham writes, to examine ‘how institutions function and operate, … how belief and ethos bring the world to movement, and … how the materiality of the world is profoundly bound up with these affective elements’.¹²

Diffractive reading can also provoke new thoughts and theories and allow the researcher to examine how such thoughts and theories can be made or remade so that they matter more towards inclusion than towards exclusion and the creation or maintenance of boundaries. Since active engagement with the world has always been a part of the ethos of peace and conflict studies, diffractive reading is well suited to the field: seeing, thinking and researching diffractively implies a self-accountable, critical and responsible entanglement with the world.

To exemplify the study of mundane events of peace and to provide responsible entanglement with the world, I will present narratives that I have collected and examined in my earlier research. It is important to note that while I use narratives as empirical material when employing diffractive methodology, the narratives as such do not form the data of my study in that I would seek to produce knowledge claims on their truthfulness or accuracy. Rather, the narratives and the vignettes I have written about them are embodied data in the sense that they bear witness to the affective and corporeal elements of the cases and events examined.¹³ The original empirical material collected for the vignettes is audiovisual (e.g. documentaries, images) and textual (e.g. narratives in media, interviews) and was collected from a variety of sources.

Spatialising the ‘local’ and producing the distant ‘other’

Although the scholars of the so-called local turn in peacebuilding are also critical of ontological solidness and the lack of context in theorising peace, their position on the everyday and the local is still too restricted for my agenda. In general, local turn scholarship engages with the peace implications of neo-liberal governance, which according to many scholars writing in this tradition, seeks to reproduce and impose Western models and to reconstruct Westphalian frameworks of state sovereignty. The liberal framework of individual rights, winner‐takes‐all elections and neoliberal free market economic programmes are seen to be at the core of such models.¹⁴ With their critique of Westphalian frameworks, local turn scholars aim at dismantling the Western bias in both theorising and practicing peace. In order to elaborate the problems of liberal peace, Roger Mac Ginty and Oliver Richmond argue that peace is simply not as neo-liberal as neo-liberal institutions would like...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Critical peace and conflict studies: feminist interventions
• 1 Mundane peace and the politics of vulnerability: a nonsolid feminist research agenda
• 2 From power-blind binaries to the intersectionality of peace: connecting feminism and critical peace and conflict studies
• 3 The ‘third gender’ in Afghanistan: a feminist account of hybridity as a gendered experience
• 4 Care as everyday peacebuilding
• 5 From expert to experiential knowledge: exploring the inclusion of local experiences in understanding violence in conflict
• 6 Veteran masculinities and audiovisual popular music in post-conflict Croatia: a feminist aesthetic approach to the contested everyday peace
• Index