Suchergebnisse

What is feminist peace? -- Feminist critical methodology, peace and social change -- Evidence of things unseen: WILPF and disarmament -- What is violence? WILPF and decolonization -- Orientalism and peace: WILPF in the Middle East -- Conclusion: feminist ways to peace

This paper follows a 1975 WILPF's "fact‐finding trip" to the Middle East and compares it to previous WILPF's official and unofficial trips to the area. My purpose is to analyze and to assess the extent to which these trips can be called "feminist" and the extent to which feminism makes a difference in the kind of "fact‐finding trip" that is undertaken and its results. Though there arguably exist several "feminisms," I argue that certain common elements exist that make political actions feminist. Historians of WILPF (such as Gertrude Bussey, Margaret Tims, Harriet Alonso, Leila Rupp) have primarily focused on the ideological and political aspects of WILPF's feminist peace politics. Instead, I am interested in how feminism can inform the methodology of peace politics. I take the example of WILPF's trips to the Middle East to specifically illustrate how a peace politics, sustained by feminist methodological principles, is more fully "peaceful." Without those principles any political action risks replicating structures of oppression, which are both the bases for violent conflict and the foundations for unjust systems, which then cannot be called "peace."

The history of the oldest international women's peace organization, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), presents a practical lesson for individuals and organizations interested in bringing about social change, as well as a theoretical lesson for those concerned with conceptualizing social change. WILPF's positions on decolonization between 1945 and 1975 show how historical circumstances and ideological environment intersected with the organization's ideas about peace to determine different policy choices. An unprecedented resolution in the early 1970s on the inevitability of violent revolutions resulted from a shift in ideological beliefs. While the international environment of the 1960s and 1970s favored this shift, WILPF arrived at its new policies thanks to its reliance on a theoretically-informed feminist critical methodology. This allowed WILPF to increasingly critique entrenched assumptions and reach a better informed understanding of peace, thereby contributing to the redefinition of the context that had created and shaped the organization. An activist-inspired, theoretically-driven feminist critical methodology thus makes social change possible. Adapted from the source document.

Feminist peace research is an emerging field of social sciences that is transdisciplinary, intersectional, and normative—as well as transnational. Although it draws from disciplines such as peace and conflict research (in and outside of international relations [IR]) as well as feminist security studies, it also differs from them in terms of research scope and research design. Consequently, it not only provides insights on what can be termed "spectacular" instances of violence or peace but also sharpens our analysis of the everydayness of reconciliatory measures and the mundaneness of both violence and peace. As a feminist endeavor, feminist peace research necessarily asks questions about unequal gender relations and power structures within any given conflict environment. In this collective discussion piece, a diverse group of scholars, who formed part of the recently convened Feminist Peace Research Network, explores and further develops the parameters of this emergent field through a set of short conversation pieces.