Abstract
ABSTRACT This article draws on feminist perspectives on the everyday to explore women’s everyday experiences of peace in Kayah state in Myanmar. We locate the daily practices women engage in to maintain life and minimise violence, making visible women’s contributions to everyday peace. In addition, we examine the ways in which women are disproportionally affected by war and prevented from benefitting from post-war changes. Our findings demonstrate that practices of care and silence are key avenues for women’s everyday peacebuilding, through which women sustain peace, ensure survival, and minimise violence in their families and wider communities. At the same time, however, these practices are conditioned by and may contribute to gendered insecurity and marginalisation for women. Through this focus, our analysis shows how women’s positioning in gendered relations of power may both enable their agency in peacebuilding and reinforce their gendered inequality and marginalisation in the post-war period. We conclude that while everyday peace practices may hold the potential for positive change, these can also contribute to the reproduction of inequality, oppression and structural violence.
Highlights
The ‘local turn’ in peace studies, and the more recent interest in ‘everyday peace’, has paved the way for an increased focus on exploring how peace and peacebuilding is manifested and practiced through mundane interactions in local, conflict-affected settings.[1]
Our findings demonstrate that practices and patterns of care and silence feature prominently in women’s experiences of everyday peace both during and after the war
Our findings demonstrate that practices of care and silence are key avenues for women’s everyday peacebuilding, through which women sustain peace, ensure survival, and minimise violence in their families and wider communities
Summary
The ‘local turn’ in peace studies, and the more recent interest in ‘everyday peace’, has paved the way for an increased focus on exploring how peace and peacebuilding is manifested and practiced through mundane interactions in local, conflict-affected settings.[1]. Care practices include the unpaid or underpaid reproduction of family, community and armed groups through household and subsistence work, undertaken in response to both force and need.[46] In this way, women’s care practices are central to the survival of individuals but have functioned as a form of conflict management, minimising violence and building trust between communities, and impor tantly, in relation to conflict-actors such as state and non-state armed groups The centrality of this labour during periods of active conflict is evidenced in the following narrative by an elderly woman, recounting wartime experiences: When the Burmese soldiers came to our village, all men ran away. Within this context of unequal power and a fragile post-war order, silence can be employed to create space for everyday peace and meaningful life, but can at the same time reproduce gendered peace gaps where women’s subordination is reinforced, their experiences denied, and their bodies – some times literally – erased
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