Building Peace Rebuilding Patriarchy

"Men and women do not experience war, violence, and peace in the same ways. Accordingly, peacebuilding interventions now incorporate "gender mainstreaming" and stand-alone "gender-and-development". These gender interventions should make peacebuilding more effective and sustainable, facilitating stable societies and efficient economies. But success has been mixed. The case of in Timor-Leste is instructive. Interventions on gender responsive budgeting, domestic violence, and microfinance have uneven results. Whereas the level of women's participation in national politics in Timor-Leste is high by international standards, overall deep inequalities remain, inequality between rural and urban areas is growing, and violence against women is endemic across the country. Feminists have found fault with gender interventions, saying they don't go far enough, and scholars of the local turn have suggested a focus on gender encourages backlash against interventions. Instead of focusing on a clash of "local" and "international", Rebuilding Patriarchy uses gender and class to explain the uneven outcomes. It argues that peacebuilders made concessions to elites and violent men in order to keep the peace, a tendency amplified by "local turn" approaches to peacebuilding. It has reinforced the valorisation of armed masculinity, associated most strongly with the dominant class, which have in turn justified the unequal distribution of state petroleum resources. As well, gender, class and domestic violence are connected through brideprice, rendering legal and political reforms ineffective. Lastly, microfinance was supposed to empower women and grow the economy, but its main beneficiaries were elites, repeating patterns of accumulation and rule-through-debt established during era Indonesian-era"--

"Men and women do not experience war, violence, and peace in the same ways. Accordingly, peacebuilding interventions now incorporate "gender mainstreaming" and stand-alone "gender-and-development". These gender interventions should make peacebuilding more effective and sustainable, facilitating stable societies and efficient economies. But success has been mixed. The case of in Timor-Leste is instructive. Interventions on gender responsive budgeting, domestic violence, and microfinance have uneven results. Whereas the level of women's participation in national politics in Timor-Leste is high by international standards, overall deep inequalities remain, inequality between rural and urban areas is growing, and violence against women is endemic across the country. Feminists have found fault with gender interventions, saying they don't go far enough, and scholars of the local turn have suggested a focus on gender encourages backlash against interventions. Instead of focusing on a clash of "local" and "international", Rebuilding Patriarchy uses gender and class to explain the uneven outcomes. It argues that peacebuilders made concessions to elites and violent men in order to keep the peace, a tendency amplified by "local turn" approaches to peacebuilding. It has reinforced the valorisation of armed masculinity, associated most strongly with the dominant class, which have in turn justified the unequal distribution of state petroleum resources. As well, gender, class and domestic violence are connected through brideprice, rendering legal and political reforms ineffective. Lastly, microfinance was supposed to empower women and grow the economy, but its main beneficiaries were elites, repeating patterns of accumulation and rule-through-debt established during era Indonesian-era"--

The twenty-­first century has brought with it a shift from the notion of human security being located in secure national borders to the need to secure the safety, freedom, and dignity of all. Despite efforts to equalize women’s status in the world evidenced by changes in many international projects requiring a gender focus, women and men experience most of the world in very different ways according to gender. Further, the reality is that humans who do not all fall neatly into one of these categories – male or female – often find their lives further challenged. In the 1980s, Peace and Conflict Studies first began to acknowledge and study the different experiences males and females have during war and peace. Since then, there have been books about women and war, women working at grassroots levels to build peace, women and transitional justice, women and peace education, and women’s views of human security. All of these works have contributed to the discourse of our changing world. This book brings together some of those themes and voices and adds more with the final product being more than the sum of its parts. We add to the conversation a book that considers foundational/fundamental issues that span from the interpersonal to the global. Many of the chapters describe empirical research completed with author and community, shared here for the first time. Part One is a collection of case studies, documenting challenges and responses to peacebuilding by women from various parts of the world. Part Two focuses on Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS) as a discipline, examining not only what is, but also what should be taught. This section critiques today’s efforts at teaching Peace and Conflict Studies and provides suggestions of how this important work might be shared in more open and equitable ways. Part Three enters territory found even less in the PACS literature. In this section our authors confront patriarchy, engage in a discussion about the contribution queer theory makes to PACS, and tussle with the notion of inclusivity with considerations of both gender and disability. It then ends with a discussion about the contribution feminist methodologies make to PACS.

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.

Facing Patriarchy challenges current thinking about men’s violence against women. Drawing upon radical and intersectional feminist theory and critical masculinity studies, the book locates men’s violence within the structures and processes of patriarchy. Addressing the limitations of current violence prevention policies, Bob Pease argues that a nuanced conceptualisation of patriarchy, that accounts for a variety of patriarchal structures, intersections with other forms of inequality, patriarchal ideologies, men’s peer group relations, men’s sexist practices and the construction of patriarchal subjectivities, is required to understand the links between gender and men’s violence against women. Pease shows that men’s violence against women needs to be understood in the context of other forms of men’s violence, including violence against boys and other men, in the involvement of men in wars and conflicts between nations and men’s ecologically destructive practices which constitute a form of slow violence. With crucial implications for priorities in violence prevention, gender equality promotion and in strategies for engaging men in this work, Facing Patriarchy offers new hope for the elimination of men’s violence. This is an essential book for scholars, practitioners, activists and policy makers involved in violence prevention in national and international contexts.

Gender and Peacebuilding offers a comprehensive and up to date analysis of how and why gender matters in contemporary peace operations. It draws on a wide range of examples from across the world to offer a nuanced account of the UN's attempts to mainstream gender into peace operations via Security Council Resolution 1325, and assesses the successes and failures of this effort to enhance the participation and protection of women and girls in peacebuilding operations. In presenting this mixed picture of progress and ongoing challenges, the book argues for bold steps forward that will enable peacebuilding to contest the current neoliberal order, address structural inequalities, and bring about feminist visions of peace and security. It is only by focusing attention on the economic empowerment of women and its ability to temper the dangers of neo-liberalism in post-conflict contexts that feminists can hope to achieve these aims. Timely, critical and engaged, this book provides an invaluable guide to the issues for students of peace and conflict studies, and sets the agenda for future scholarship and advocacy.

For over a century and in scores of countries, patriarchal presumptions and practices have been challenged by women and their male allies. “Sexual harassment” has entered common parlance; police departments are equipped with rape kits; more than half of the national legislators in Bolivia and Rwanda are women; and a woman candidate won the plurality of the popular votes in the 2016 United States presidential election. But have we really reached equality and overthrown a patriarchal point of view? The Big Push exposes how patriarchal ideas and relationships continue to be modernized to this day. Through contemporary cases and reports, renowned political scientist Cynthia Enloe exposes the workings of everyday patriarchy—in how Syrian women civil society activists have been excluded from international peace negotiations; how sexual harassment became institutionally accepted within major news organizations; or in how the UN Secretary General’s post has remained a masculine domain. Enloe then lays out strategies and skills for challenging patriarchal attitudes and operations. Encouraging self-reflection, she guides us in the discomforting curiosity of reviewing our own personal complicity in sustaining patriarchy in order to withdraw our own support for it. Timely and globally conscious, The Big Push is a call for feminist self-reflection and strategic action with a belief that exposure complements resistance.

As of 2023, over nine million Colombians have secured official recognition as victims of an armed conflict that has lasted decades. The category of "victim" is not a mere description of having suffered harm, but a political status and a potential site of power. In Good Victims, Roxani Krystalli investigates the politics of victimhood as a feminist question. Based on in-depth engagement in Colombia over the course of a decade, Krystalli argues for the possibilities of politics through, rather than in opposition to, the status of "victim." Encompassing acts of care, agency, and haunting, the politics of victimhood entangle people who identify as victims, researchers, and transitional justice professionals. Krystalli shows how victimhood becomes a pillar of reimagining the state in the wake of war, and of bringing a vision of that state into being through bureaucratic encounters. Good Victims also sheds light on the ethical and methodological dilemmas that arise when contemplating the legacies of transitional justice mechanisms.

Through an ethnographic study of gender training practices in peacekeeping institutions, Aiko Holvikivi examines how gender is conceptualised, taught, and learned in these settings, and with what political effects. She finds that this training constitutes a deeply ambivalent practice from the point of view of intersectional feminist political commitments. Drawing on queer and postcolonial feminist thought, Fixing Gender examines the contradictory politics of gender training, arguing that we need to develop the analytical tools to grapple with paradoxical practices that are simultaneously good and bad feminist politics.

This book provides the first full-length examination of the global politics of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). It provides answers to the puzzle of why inequalities and barriers to SRHR continue to exist within a wider political context where the importance of gender equality has never been more accepted, and women are represented as central to major global agendas. In the increasingly crisis-prone world we live in today, the neglect of health and particularly women's health and well-being, seems counter-intuitive. The answers discussed in this book details how and why violations to women's bodily autonomy are a central feature of contemporary global order.