Gender-Intersectional Regimes: How Gender & Nationality Shape Peace Initiatives in Israel-Palestine

Abstract

Building on research that considers women’s roles an essential part of peacebuilding, this paper argues that a gender-national intersectionality perspective is needed to better understand the field of peace organizing. Exploring this in the context of intractable conflict in Israel-Palestine allows us to see how the intersection of gender and nationality uniquely affects women in peacebuilding. Relying on observations of group dynamics in a single organization and interviews with actors involved, we found that Palestinian women are the most marginalized in their participation, culture is used as a source of power in the way differences are conceptualized, and these aspects are embedded in gendered and gendering organizational practices that reproduce asymmetric gender-national power relations. These findings contribute to the theorization of the matrix of domination and how it is translated into peace organizing in both interactional and organizational practices, affecting possibilities of participation in dialogue groups and peacebuilding.