Women's Peace Research Articles

The Success of Women's Participation In Resolving Conflicts In Liberia

The Civil War that occurred in Liberia has been going on for a long time, where there are two rebel groups, they are: Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) and Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL). Both of these rebel groups have caused gender inequality in Liberia continuously, especially women who have been victims of this war. However, with the efforts and participation of women from Liberian society, the war was successfully reconciled without creating violence. This research is aimed at realizing that women are not only victims of gender inequality, but can also be 'agents of change' in creating peace and better change for the future of a country. This research will use qualitative research methods, that emphasize the observation and understanding of a social phenomenon, where data is collected through secondary data and literature review. This research will analyze the case using three concepts: Feminism, Gender Equality, and Peace. The research concluded that there have been several efforts that have been made by women to resolve conflicts in Liberia by creating and building peace sustainably so that peace can be stable for a long time. The efforts that have been made by Liberian women are by creating several organizations and affiliations, they are: Woman in the Peacebuilding Network (WIPNET), Mano River Women's Peace Network (MARWOPNET), Association of Female Lawyers of Liberia (AFELL). This long-term peace can improve gender equality in several sectors of Liberian society, such as the economy and political sectors that are getting better and more effective from year to year.

Gender Justice in EU Crisis Management Missions

This paper examines competing understanding of gender justice between CSDP civil and military staff and representatives of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs). Using the three GLOBUS concepts of justice as an analytical framework the paper shows that there is a sharp contrast between CSDP staff discourse on gender justice and the implementation the Women Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, and discourse from CSOs. It finds that approaches to gender justice in CSDP missions have been largely dominated by a justice as impartiality approach, located in the language of universal human rights but when we look at the actual the implementation of the WPS agenda in the field (or lack thereof), an approach rooted in the state-centric model of justice as non-domination emerges. In contrast, CSOs tend to advocate for the inclusion of a more context specific approach, one that takes account of intersectionality and complexity, more aligned with justice as mutual recognition. This disconnect in understandings of gender justice is problematic because in order for missions to be successful, or to have any transformative power, there is a need for a level of engagement between mission staff and CSOs. This is in order to take a context specific approach to gender justice in CDPD missions and to avoid the curtailing of certain women’s voices. The paper uses qualitative data from interviews with civilian and personnel from within military field missions and representatives of a variety of CSOs from both the global North and South.

The Worst Place on Earth to be a Woman: Violence against Yemeni Women in Peace and War

despite excessively high levels of violence and male control, Yemeni women have displayed remarkable resilience and a determination to challenge some of the unjust laws and norms that shape their society. They do this on the basis that such conventions do not derive from Islam but, rather, from imperfect interpretations, whether deliberate or not, by men. Yemeni women?s confidence comes both from outrage and humiliation and also a history of activism. In order to encourage political empowerment for women in Yemen, there need to be cultural changes and institutional changes. However, the deterioration in their status since the start of the war in 2014 and the escalating levels of violence against them illustrates in bleak terms how quickly progress can be reversed. The rise in male violence against women raises troubling questions about unbalanced gender relations and the propensity, during periods of instability, to punish women and exclude them from the national narrative.

Shifting Conceptions of Gender Justice in EU Policy on Women Peace and Security

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security was a landmark resolution passed in 2000 that, for the first time, recognised the differing impact of conflict on women and girls and called for greater participation of women in conflict resolution and peacebuilding. This Resolution has now been followed by a further 8 Resolutions, which, together, make up the Women, Peace and Security Agenda. This paper examines United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security through the lens of the three GLOBUS conceptions of justice: justice as non-domination, justice as impartiality and justice as mutual recognition. The paper argues that in the process and adoption of the 2018 EU Strategic approach to UNSCR 1325, the EU has demonstrated a shift towards an approach to gender justice that is more closely assigned to justice as mutual recognition than in its previous approach to Women, Peace and Security, found in the 2008 Comprehensive Approach to UNSCR 1325 and 1820. Using empirical data from meeting notes and qualitative interviews, this paper demonstrates how the EEAS engaged in a surprisingly inclusive process within the consultations that led to the adoption of the new 2018 Strategic Approach, which enjoyed extensive inclusion of a diversity of civil society voices in the process. As a result, the document shows a shift towards a greater focus on (1) diversity, (2) civil society inclusion and (3) a gendered analysis. From the perspective of gender justice, this shows a shift from an approach previously aligned with justice as impartiality in the text of the 2008 document, but in actuality, through a lack of implementation, an approach more akin to non-domination, towards an approach to gender justice that can be more firmly associated with justice as mutual recognition.

Strategic relationship management and civic information in an activist organization

This study examines the organizational practices of CODEPINK: Women for Peace, a social activist organization, between January 1 and October 1, 2018 to understand the organization’s strategic data-driven practices during activist campaigns. The results provide important insights into the mechanisms a digital-grassroots organization takes to spread civic information to users for political participation. In a series of semi-structured interviews, analyzed with content-analysis, respondents indicated organizational practices that included the use of a non-partisan political customer relationship management (CRM) platform, social matching, and interest-based targeted emailing. CODEPINK uses these tools to help facilitate support for fundraising, direct marketing, and organizing campaigns. Understanding how social movement organizations use media innovations to support their action repertoires provides a better framework for understanding modern-day activist practices.

Challenges to women's inclusion in peace processes in Thailand and Myanmar

ABSTRACT This article discusses the challenges that women face in their attempts to engage with peace processes. It first reviews the existing literature and then provides an analysis based on in-depth interviews with women members of peace networks in Thailand and in Myanmar and key stakeholders with relevant knowledge. The findings highlight the challenges that women's networks face in both countries: (1) the challenge of getting a seat at the table in the peace processes where women are increasingly visible in peace-building activism yet still lack power to influence formal frameworks; (2) the challenge of getting representation and the support of various local communities; and finally, (3) the challenge of getting the message right in terms of balancing gender advocacy with peace building in a context where gender advocacy is perceived as disrupting social relations. These key findings suggest that, to be effective, women's peace networks have to find the right balance between gender advocacy and addressing these key challenges. The article ends with a set of recommendations aimed at strengthening the impact of women's peace networks.

The United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (Unscr 1325) and The Challenges of Women Participation in Peace Building and Conflict Resolution in Nigeria: Critical Analysis

In 31 October, 2000, the United Nations Security Council adopted and signed SC Resolution 1325 on Women Peace and Security. Resolution 1325 recognizes that civilian, particularly women and children are the worst affected by conflict. Resolution 1325 call for women participation in conflict prevention and resolution initiative, the integration of gender perspective in peace building, peace keeping mission and the protection of women in regions of conflict. The resolution reaffirms the important role of women in the prevention and resolution of conflicts, peace negotiations, peace-building, peace keeping, humanitarian response and in post-conflict reconstruction; stressing the importance of equal participation in peace and security. In Africa, women participation in policy making, peace building and conflict resolution is still faced with setbacks despite the passing of the SCR 1325 two decades ago. Findings from this study has shown that, women have been subjected to domination by men as a result of persisting cultural stereotypes, abuse of religious and traditional practices, patriarchal societal structures in which economic, political and social power are dominated by men while women played the role of followers of male decision-makers. The study identifies such challenges for a change or reforms them. The paper reviewed many of the extant studies on the role and potentials of women in peace building and conflict resolution. Analyzing those challenges inhibiting the participation of women in peace process. The paper adopted the qualitative approach whereby data collected from secondary sources were reviewed, explained and analyzed within the purview of the study. The paper conclude, the views that bringing women into the peace process, as participation of women makes it sustainable and reduces possibility of inadequate outcome or failure of the entire process, may be an illusion. Unless the women are economically and politically empowered, as one of the outstanding equality of peace-makers or negotiators is the amount of political and economic influence they possessed. Only elite centric gender blind composition of negotiation and peace process team cannot ensure sustainable peace process as there could be no peace with one side so disadvantaged.

Introductory Remarks: Overview of General Research Trends and Topical Focus for 2020: Researching Human Rights and Artificial Intelligence

There are many current threads in human rights research today; some are extensions of more traditional concerns, and others call upon the application of human rights law as a part of international law that is evoked by recent and changing realities. There is, first, a historical turn in international law that is relevant to human rights even though it is more traditional for legal scholarship to look at such sources. Recently, Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) and discoveries about the role of the women's peace movement (as women endured and challenged the mixed messages about their roles at the time of the founding of the League of Nations) are new perspectives in that they were previously set aside, as were indigenous people's perspectives. Historian Reza Afshari and others have spoken to the focus on structural transformation and lived realities as a more political methodology for human rights, going beyond discourse and its possible Western biases. Third, environmental research has emerged in a new way, using empirical data and big data to track the impact on health and human rights; included here may be the current situation of the COVID-19 pandemic. There are also new developments in the law of war, such as drone strikes, which take us toward automated war. The automation of human functions and judgments takes us, finally, to this panel's focus on human rights research: artificial intelligence, or AI. There may arise a theory of agency implicating those who create or operate AI outside a war context, or even within it as alleged war crimes.

The Vietnam War and Chicana/o Environmentalism in El Grito del Norte (1968–73)

The Vietnam War and Chicana/o Environmentalism in El Grito del Norte (1968–73) Emily Cheng (bio) This essay addresses El Grito del Norte (EGDN), a Chicana/o nationalist newspaper published in Española, a small working-class town in northern New Mexico, from 1968 to 1973. The paper was originally formed to support the politics of La Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grants), the organization led by Reies López Tijerina that in the 1960s and 1970s sought the restoration of land grants established under the Spanish and Mexican governments. Written and run by women, the paper was founded and edited by Elizabeth "Betita" Martínez (known previously as Elizabeth Sutherland), whose socialist and third-world feminist politics shaped the paper's concern with the connections between rural Chicana women of New Mexico and other women of color in the US and abroad.1 Though the paper was committed to Chicana/o issues grounded in New Mexico, it soon moved away from its original role as a mouthpiece for the Alianza to include reports on indigenous issues in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. EGDN was, in Martínez's words, the "only one" of "about twenty Chicano newspapers … that was completely international."2 Of particular importance was the newspaper's reporting on Vietnam, which made it exceptional among a Chicano press in the 1960s that, George Mariscal notes, "was largely silent on the topic of the war in Southeast Asia."3 The paper's coverage included a special issue on North Vietnam by Martínez, a five-part series by Valentina Valdez explaining Vietnam and the war to readers, articles addressing Chicanos serving in the military by Enriqueta Vasquez that appeared in "El Soldado Razo Today" and her column, "Despierten! Hermanos," reports on the military events of the war, poetry by Ho Chi Minh, and a report on the Chicano Viêt Nam Project, a solidarity organization.4 While other scholars have written about the newspaper's concerns with land in New Mexico and, to a lesser extent, its third-world feminist politics, I examine how these aspects of the paper come together with its internationalism [End Page 55] to represent a distinctive and radical "environmental" politics. I do not mean to argue that the writers and activists who contributed to EGDN identified themselves as environmentalists or to attach this label to them. What I do want to argue is that, in contrast to the mainstream environmental movement that emerged in this period, these women writers possessed an environmental understanding that fundamentally engaged social justice, particularly around issues of race, gender, and imperialism. The environmental epistemology in EGDN was shaped by, but moved beyond, the long-standing relationship between Mexican-origin people, land, and nature in the US Southwest that was central to Chicana/o nationalist politics, as I discuss through Vasquez's article "La Santa Tierra." In considering Vietnam as another site in which to explore and understand the violence the US empire inflicts on land and colonized people, EGDN made connections between the US Southwest and Vietnam that developed its alternative environmental lens. Approaching the North Vietnamese as fellow peasants, or "campesinos," whose harmonious relationship to the land was being attacked by US imperialism, the newspaper made womanhood central to forging this relationship between Chicana/o and North Vietnamese anticolonialism. The feminist politics of "global sisterhood" facilitated the writers' interest in Vietnam, and their access to direct encounters with Vietnamese women through the international women's peace movement. The women writers of the paper also deployed a gendered lens that highlighted the role of women in environmental resistance to masculine military violence and symbolically established similarities between the two communities through idealized portrayals of rural, domestic life. With its attention to the lived human relationship to land, EGDN offered an alternative to notions of land that were central to mainstream American environmental thinking, which generally assumed the "separability of the human and natural realms … expressed through a melancholic attitude linking natural plenitude with human absence."5 In this mainstream tradition, land has been considered through the ideal of wilderness, and the human realm predominantly characterized by the individual relationship to the land through possession...

Recovering the "Most Neglected Feminist Leader of the Twentieth Century": Crystal Eastman, Historical Memory, and the Bequest of an Intersectional Inheritance

At the time of her death in 1928, Crystal Eastman was one of the most conspicuous political women in the United States. A cofounder of the National Woman's Party, the Woman's Peace Party, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Eastman also drafted the nation's first serious workers' compensation law and has been credited as a coauthor of the Equal Rights Amendment. Yet nearly a century later, her legacy is oddly ambiguous. Over time, she has become a strangely elided figure—commemorated, paradoxically, as one of the most neglected feminist leaders in American history. This article explores Eastman's political identity, connecting it to the question of her complex legacy in historical memory today. I argue it was her intersectional imperative—her drive to bridge multiple social justice movements all under one emancipatory rubric—that destabilized her historical standing and intelligibility. By reexamining her public life and career in light of new sources and frameworks, I aim to redefine the transgressive nature of her politics for a new generation of women's studies scholars.

Subverting economic empowerment: Towards a postcolonial-feminist framework on gender (in)securities in post-war settings

This article demonstrates that the inability of the United Nations Women, Peace and Security agenda to realize greater peace and security for women in post-war states stems to a great extent from its failure to engage deeply with the materiality of women’s lives under economic empowerment projects. We argue that the Women, Peace and Security agenda reproduces a neoliberal understanding of economic empowerment that inadequately captures the reality of women’s lives in post-war settings for two reasons: first, it views formal and informal economic activities as dichotomous and separate, rather than as intertwined and constitutive of each other; and, second, it conceptualizes agency as individual, disembodied, abstract, universalizing and conforming to the requirements of the competitive pressures of the market. The article then offers a three-pronged postcolonial-feminist framework to analyse international interventions in which representation, materiality and agency are interconnected. We argue that such a framework helps understand better who is empowered in post-war economies and how they are empowered. This, in turn, makes visible how post-war economies produce gendered and racialized (in)securities that need to be addressed by the Women, Peace and Security agenda. With this, we also hope to reflect on broader international political economy concerns about the problems of making conceptual distinctions between politics and economics, and to challenge the constructed borders between materiality and discourse that have pervaded peace and conflict studies.

Women Peace and Security: Adrift in Policy and Practice

This comment reflects on how the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has been translated into policy and put into practice by the European Union and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Although the WPS agenda has enabled many gains by women peacebuilders, this comment identifies important challenges from these two very different contexts. First, situating WPS policy areas within a broader feminist political economy analysis demonstrates how little influence the WPS agenda has across government. Second, the WPS agenda is being (mis)used to promote heteronormative, patriarchal understanding of ‘gender’, stripped of any power dynamics and excluding any gender identities that do not conform. The result, then, is that WPS policies and practice are adrift in the patriarchal policy mainstream.

Corrigendum: A Century of International Relations Feminism: From World War I Women's Peace Pragmatism to the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

Corrigendum: A Century of International Relations Feminism: From World War I Women's Peace Pragmatism to the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

A Century of International Relations Feminism: From World War I Women's Peace Pragmatism to the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

A Century of International Relations Feminism: From World War I Women's Peace Pragmatism to the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

Pembacaan Tafsir Feminis Nasarudin Umar Sebagai Tranformasi Sosial Islam

This paper will reveal a feminist interpretation as a reading that can transform Islamic social, because social understanding of society has long been eroded by the reading of classical interpretation, which tends to be biased and discriminative against women, so through reading the feminist interpretation of Nasarudin Umar, Opening a just horizon of reading (equality), peace for both men and women. Due to his tafsir exposure which tends to be more concerned with social conditions, Nasaruddin Umar tries to give a new color in interpreting the Qur'an with etymological analysis, hermeneutics and using history to examine many words in the Qur'an. So the pattern of interpreter is more to consider the macro-social aspects than the micro in each verse, in order to produce a reading of tafsir that can transform the social state of Islamic society.

Traditional Roles of African Women in Peace Making and Peace Building: An Evaluation

The study set out to scrutinize the scope of conflict in Africa and further evaluate the contribution of women to the peace process as well as the challenges such roles impose on them. The study affirms the important roles of women as an agent of peace in which they demonstrated an act of courage and love to end conflicts when men failed. The study shows that there is an overemphasis on women as victims of conflict or sometimes as combatants or agents. This largely conceals the invaluable contribution of women to the peace process. This position amounts to placing them in a position that they might be seen as weaklings or perpetrators of conflict. The study further concludes that most of the conflicts that became protracted and deeprooted reflect institutional failure and the refusal of those in the position of authority to act at the right time due to greed, poverty, and lack of inclusive arrangement in governance. The study, therefore, recommends that the root of the problem must first be attacked in that government must be proactive enough to monitor, act promptly to diffuse tension in explosive issues that could lead to direct violence. This is achievable if the government is sincere, honest, and adopts an inclusive approach in governance thereby ensuring fairness in the distribution of resources.

Marching Grounds: Vietnam War Dissent and America's Activist Tradition

Marching GroundsVietnam War Dissent and America's Activist Tradition Heather Stur (bio) Jessica M. Frazier. Women's Antiwar Diplomacy during the Vietnam War Era. 8 halftones, notes, bibliography, index, 236 pp. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Cloth $80.00, paper $29.95. David L. Parsons. Dangerous Grounds: Antiwar Coffeehouses and Military Dissent in the Vietnam Era. Notes, bibliography, index, 176 pp. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Cloth $29.95. Less than a year into World War I, women from twelve countries gathered at The Hague, Netherlands, to discuss their shared antiwar sentiment and establish an international women's peace movement. Delegates elected Jane Addams, founder of the U.S. Women's Peace Party, to be the first president of the resulting organization, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. U.S. entry into the war in 1917 and the subsequent military draft fueled antiwar activism among Americans of various stripes, including draft-eligible men. Ben Salmon, a Catholic from Denver, registered for the draft and applied for conscientious objector status on the same day. He was arrested, convicted in both civilian and military courts, and sentenced to death. The military reduced his sentence, and he served time in a military prison, where he staged a hunger strike for more than one hundred days.1 When the war ended, American veterans returning home expected the government to make good on its promise of bonus pay for overseas service. The Great Depression made the reward a necessity, and in 1932, tens of thousands of veterans from all over the country gathered in Washington, D.C. They set up shantytowns, where they vowed to live until federal officials heard their demands. Civilians like Lillie Linebarrier and the members of her "Friendly Bonus Expeditionary Force String Band" joined the Bonus Army in Washington and provided entertainment and moral support to the striking veterans. President Herbert Hoover sent in troops to evict the demonstrators, and with tanks and tear gas, the Army drove World War I veterans from their encampments. Despite its violent ending, the bonus march resulted in government payouts to veterans and established the foundation for the GI Bill.2 In the early [End Page 510] twentieth century, civilian and military Americans expressed their opinions about war, collaborated internationally, and wielded the power of protest to get the government's attention. In two engagingly written books, historians Jessica Frazier and David Parsons examine how these traditions played out during the Vietnam War era. Frazier recounts the experiences of antiwar American women who collaborated with North Vietnamese and NLF women in international networks to oppose the conflict in Vietnam. Cultural imperialism might have tainted a relationship between Western and Third World women, but Frazier argues that Vietnamese women had the upper hand as they showed their Western counterparts, seemingly with ease, how to negotiate the alleged contradictions between maternalism and feminism. While Frazier's women are out in the global political sphere, Parsons's subjects, antiwar male GIs and veterans, are back on the home front, finding an outlet for their frustrations about Vietnam in GI coffeehouses. The central message of Parsons's story is that coffeehouses provided the necessary physical space to bring antiwar GIs, veterans, and civilians together to transform their shared ideas about the war and the U.S. military into action. Both authors claim to challenge conventional wisdom—Frazier on the power balance in international women's networks, Parsons on the relationship between antiwar civilians and U.S. soldiers—about the Vietnam War era. Frazier's story follows the common chronological development of American women's Cold War-era activism. Maternalism was central to organizations such as Women Strike for Peace (WSP), which began in the early Sixties as an anti-nuclear movement. Arguing from their positions as mothers allowed WSP members to stare down the prying eye of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which saw communists in any group that questioned the Defense Department. It was a maternal responsibility to protect children, WSP representatives testified before Congress, and so mothers were only doing their duty by opposing weapons of mass destruction. By mid-decade, the war in Vietnam had...

“The Most Naked Phase of Our Struggle”: Gendered Shaming and Masculinist Desiring‐Production in Turkey's War on Terror

The photographs that circulated on social media depicting (and shamelessly celebrating) the atrocious acts committed by the Turkish military forces in southeast Turkey are indicative of an aesthetic (re)construction of militarized masculinity that serves as a metonym for the nation‐state. As violence is aestheticized in a gendered fashion in these depictions, the Kurdish resistance movement is shamed as feminine. Gendered shaming, in this context, conjoins racialization and gendering as subjugating mechanisms of the state. Women's peace movements seek to disrupt this heteropatriarchal logic of the state by countering the tripartite alignment of masculinity‐power‐domination with politicized art. In refusing the shame attributed to femininity, the shame that the state desires the Kurdish body to signify, they transfigure shame into honor and resistance.

Coping with Armed Conflict: The Case of the Women and Children in Aleosan, Cotabato

The study aimed to analyze the experiences of the armed conflict of the women and children and to determine their coping mechanisms. The study was descriptive and qualitative in nature. It deals with the historical account of the armed conflict of the women and children, the effects of the armed conflict, their coping mechanisms, and the interventions done by the different agencies. The Women’s Kalipay Association who experienced armed conflict in the year 2000 were the respondents of the study. Their children were also taken as respondents and they were purposively chosen. The study made use of self-made questionnaires and interview guides for interview and Focus Group Discussion with the key informants, women and children. Findings show that the armed conflict in Aleosan, Pagangan had enormous adverse effects on the lives of the residents. The economic sources of the people were greatly affected. They were plunged deeply into poverty due to loss of livelihood and property. With the experiences they have gone through-from fleeing for their lives, from the difficulties and inconveniencies in the evacuation centers, from contending themselves on the limited food supply and other assistance, these vulnerable groups of Pagangan had used various means of coping strategies in trying to recover from the trauma of war. The children dreamt and wished for peace, justice and love between and among tri-people of Mindanao as reflected in their drawings. Peace for women means good health; basic needs were met and no armed conflict.

Narratives of Support and Resistance: A Political Psychological Analysis of the Implementation of UNSCR 1325 in Bosnia and Herzegovina

This article presents an analysis of norm change, and, more specifically, how gender equality norms are negotiated in Bosnia. The immediate reason for asking these questions is the adoption of the United Nations Security Council resolution 1325 in 2000 on women, peace, and security and the massive global effort to change gender equality norms in order to improve peacebuilding efforts. We argue that implementation of the United Nations' Women Peace and Security (WPS) agenda rests on localization of gender equality norms. Our contention is that this process takes place on different levels. Based on a series focus‐group interviews in Bosnia we offer depth to what a localization process can look like. We discuss what this means for the WPS agenda in Bosnia, for norm change, and for political psychological scholarship.