The Production of Gendered Knowledge of War

Women and Epistemic Power

Annika Björkdahl, Johanna Mannergren

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040344200
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This edited volume critically investigates women's knowledge about war and explores the epistemic agency of women in a range of contemporary settings across the globe.

Women are deeply affected by war, participate in war and resist war. At the same time, knowledge production often ignores and marginalizes women's experiences and gendered ways of knowing war. From Colombia to Israel and Palestine, Liberia, Mali, Myanmar, Nepal, North America, Northern Iraq and Ukraine, the chapters in this book illuminate gendered knowledge production in and about different conflict-affected sites. By taking the embodied and narrative epistemic agency of local 'knowers' seriously, new insights are thereby presented about the role women play in producing knowledge about war. The book proposes new theoretical vantage points in order to understand how epistemic power and epistemic violence are closely related. Bringing the topic of knowledge production into the so-called 'Women, Peace and Security' (WPS) agenda, it analyses how knowledge of the gendered nature of war and security is produced and circulated, and argues that the WPS agenda is a system of knowledge with its own omissions and silences. By theorizing gendered knowledge production and amplifying the voices of women as epistemic agents, this book advances scholarship on gender and war.

This book will be of much interest to students of feminist studies, peace studies, war and conflict studies and International Relations.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of acronyms and abbreviations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Theorizing gendered knowledge of war
• 1 Incorporating epistemic agency in UN Peacebuilding Fund projects: Success stories, silences and contestations in Liberia
• 2 Archival research, security records and violence against women: Evidence from the First Intifada
• 3 Knowing violence: Human rights documentation, narrative agency and resistance in Myanmar
• 4 The politics of knowledge, positionality and power: The ‘inclusivity’ of Indigenous women in peacemaking in Turtle Island (North America)
• 5 Women, peace and security: Women ex-combatants, reintegration and knowledge production of war in postwar Nepal
• 6 Malian women’s experiences with violent extremism: What is known and how is it known?
• 7 Insurgent war knowledge? Silences and embodied epistemic agency in insurgent women’s postwar militancy in Colombia
• 8 From the USSR to Ukraine: An autoethnographic account of researching women and war
• 9 Epistemic agency, embodied knowledge and power in the digital space: The case of Nadia Murad
• Index