Conflict transition, emplaced identity and the gendered politics of scale in Solomon Islands

Abstract

Although there is growing recognition that women’s participation is critical for the durability of peaceful conflict transition, grounded research examining the political scale of women’s participation has not been common. Where feminist researchers have tackled this topic, they have generally reproduced binary representations of political space, sometimes strongly critical of local spaces as restrictive of women, sometimes strongly critical of a hegemonic liberal international. In this article, I address the issue of women’s participation in conflict transition governance from another more ethnographic angle, drawing from fieldwork conducted in the Solomon Islands, a Pacific Islands country destabilised by conflict in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I apply theories of political scale to consider where and how women are politically active in the conflict transition environment, how that political activity is constituted relative to other political scales and where and how women seek to make their political ambitions understood. The ‘emplacement’ lens I develop offers a critical vantage point for analysis of the ways women constitute political identities and the agendas they might meaningfully progress, at scales ranging from the small worlds of the household and the community to the broader scale of national politics.