What does peace mean when it is attendant to the everyday lives of women and girls? If we shift the focus away from war and conflict, which are central to the disciplines of international law and international relations, conversations can explore peace, security and feminism as interlinked.
Our recently published book, Feminist Conversations on Peace, brings together conversations between activists, academics, judges and peace builders from different parts of the world that conceptualise, expand and problematise understandings of ‘feminist peace’.
The chapters in this collection are conversations, or more accurately, ‘fragments’ of conversations between the contributors. To spark the discussion, we suggested a guiding topic: to imagine what feminist peace is or could be. In answering, many responded with reflections on the obstacles faced by those on the front lines of trying to work towards a plural, diverse and inclusive concept of peace. Throughout the collection, the conversations address the need for an intersectional peace, one embracing the ‘simultaneity’ of oppressions that diverges from a state-centric, neoliberal, neocolonial and patriarchal concept of peace. Feminist engagements in different academic fields and on the ground have exposed how current state-dominated and institutionalised mechanisms for peace prioritise a militarised and securitised conception of peace, fail to commit to the international disarmament agenda, and eschew acknowledgement of a broader neocolonial and neoliberal global system of power.
The wealth of critical and decolonial feminist work on peace and security demonstrates a much broader vision of peace, far beyond the confines of the Women, Peace and Security agenda and women’s participation in securitisation and militarism. In these places we find peace and security understood as relational, connected to structural equalities, harmony with a sustained ecosystem, community participation and existence, and a freedom to choose, unfettered from the ‘multiple scalar violences entangled with the fabric of our assembled imperialist order’. Economic rights, land rights, social rights, racial and gender justice – all are fundamental to these visions of peace, and have been articulated by women and collectives for centuries as essential to peace, security, justice and community and environmental stability. The contributors show how thinking about feminist peace can allow space to ‘resist the “post-conflict” imagination of peace, and […] seize moments of peacebuilding within that the existing chaos and undo the violence against marginalised communities’.
Similarly, the conversations in this volume testify that it is not uncomplicated to attach ‘feminism’ and ‘peace’. Both come with histories of contestation and violence. A number of contributors highlight how feminism, as well as peace, should be thought of as plural and multisited, as contested and reimagined across different spaces. In addition, conflict and violence have been enacted in the name of both peace and feminism, necessitating an intersectional approach that accounts for the co-constitution of gender, race and class, and thus the intersecting nature of these structural oppressions.
Many of the chapters overlap, with several themes emerging throughout the collection. In particular, a distinction emerges between ‘peace’ as wielded and imposed externally, and peace as conceptualised by the contributors. Contributors highlight the violence that has been enacted through peace and problematise how the word is conceptualised in neoliberal, patriarchal, heteronormative capitalist politics. Indeed, it is for this reason that a number of contributors highlight their discomfort with the word peace. On the other hand, each conversation reflects on the word and makes space for a reimagining of peace and what it might constitute to challenge these global structures that are the source of so much violence and inequality. Other themes include movement building, the climate breakdown, disarmament, queer and LGBTI struggles for equality.
The conversations published in this book took place during the first stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. The conversation felt like an important means of connection, taking place often at kitchen tables in different geographical locations around the world. Feminists, in particular Black feminists, have used conversation as a qualitative methodology and to centre the labour and thinking that is considered to occur at the margins, or outside the public/political realm. This work highlights conversation and ‘everyday talk’ as a source and site of labour, politics and activism, as well as a process of care such as through ‘checking in’ as a means of solidarity.
We found conversations provided for accessibility of content, acting as a form of resistance against academic and disciplinary jargon. Using conversation as a means of authorship and subsequently publishing conversations intact helped mitigate the ways that academic and legal language ‘flattens and confines in absolutes the complexity of meaning inherent in any given problem’. The language of academic and report writing, for instance, is often distinct and atomised from the language we talk and communicate in and is designed to disavow anything that may be construed as emotive or personal. Publishing transcripts becomes important then to demonstrate the depth of knowledge and theorising that emerges in these spaces, but without the demand for generalisation and objectivity that is often inherent within academic work.
A conversation suggests dialogue and exchange, with contributors seeking to learn and share, without a power hierarchy of one being under analysis of the other. Conversation also does not make the demand for consensus that would be implicit in a standard co-authored contribution. Contributors to the chapters in this volume had the space to share experiences and perspectives and conceptualise feminist peace, without needing to reach agreement within the conversation. Indeed, the conversations here, both individually and collectively, demonstrate the necessity of peace being understood as plural, multisited and contested. They show how peace explored through multiple feminist lenses and from differently situated knowledges makes visible multiple sites of violence and oppression and the complex power structures that touch and shape individuals’ lives.
We hope this collection will help to continue and expand a broader conversation on what feminist peace means or could mean for all of us.
Sarah Smith is Centre Manager at the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security. Keina Yoshida is a human rights lawyer at the Center for Reproductive Rights, and a visiting fellow at the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security.
Feminist Conversations on Peace edited by Sarah Smith and Keina Yoshida is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £27.99.
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Image credit: Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona