Building peace in hybrid spaces: women's agency in Iraqi NGOs

Abstract

International peacebuilding efforts in Iraq have been widely criticised by practitioners and academics. Without neglecting these critiques, I elaborate how external intervention has also created spaces for Iraqi women to exercise different forms of agency. Critical approaches in peace and conflict studies often limit so-called ‘local’ agency to resisting liberal agendas, assuming persistent binaries between local and international spaces. I argue here that upholding those binaries implicitly fosters an absolute understanding of space that fails to meet realities on the ground. This article seeks to outline a concept of gendered agency that integrates a relational conceptualisation of space into the hitherto applied understandings of agency. Drawing on empirical evidence from Iraq, it elaborates how a relational theory of space contributes to grasping hybrid realities and notions of agency on the ground. Beyond analysing spaces of agency for women in (post-)conflict Iraq, the article discusses the value of incorporating a relational understanding of space into critical peacebuilding studies.