Imaginative identification. Feminist critical methodology in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (1945--1975)

Abstract

Unrestricted This dissertation develops a theory of agency, which engages the agent-structure debate in constructivist International Relations. I examine the policies of the oldest international women's peace organization, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), toward disarmament, decolonization and Israel/Palestine between 1945 and 1975. I argue that changes in these policies embodied different ideas about peace. The WILPF's early understandings of peace were grounded in liberal modern principles and inscribed in the post-war international order. Gradually, the WILPF began identifying the limitations of its ideological foundations and of the international liberal order, and formulating policies based on this critique. I argue that though the international environment of the 1960s and 1970s favored these shifts, the WILPF arrived at its new policies thanks to an increasing reliance on feminist critical methods, which the organization consciously but largely implicitly followed, and which allowed it to break the entrapment of the context that created and shaped it.; From the WILPF's women's activism I distill the elements of a methodology of emancipatory social change: I argue that, as activists, the WILPF's women practiced a theoretically-informed methodology whenever, during the course of making policy decisions, they reflected on the relationship between their views about the world (ontology), their understanding of how they knew what they (thought they) knew about the world (epistemology), their ethical stances about world problems and the issue of peace, and the ways they chose to act about them (methods). As activists they made theoretical contributions to feminist IR by proposing different ways to think about the relationship between women, feminism and peace.; The history of the WILPF suggests that, rather than identifying a firm set of principles about what constitutes emancipation, social change, or even peace, a critical constructivist theory of emancipatory agency needs a methodology that favors an inclusive decision-making process, recurrent self-criticism, the enactment of a feminist ethics of care, and applies these practices to a set of initial, and always immanent, criteria. I propose that feminist critical methodology helps actors challenge the constraints and shaping powers of structures and effect emancipatory social change.