This textbook provides a comprehensive overview of the field of gender, feminism and peace.
It is based on the argument that feminist thinking is necessary to understand and analyse the core issues in peace and conflict studies and is fundamental to thinking about solutions to global problems and to promoting peaceful conflict transformation. The book centres alternative and critical approaches missing in mainstream peace research and brings forward feminist perspectives on traditional peace research topics such as militarism, peacekeeping, arms trade and the articulation of different forms of violence. It also advances critical and alternative issues and topics that traditional peace research has sidelined, including, for example, artificial intelligence, technologies and peace; trauma and memory; human–non-human species relations; art; popular culture; post-colonial and decolonial feminist perspectives; and the queering of war and peace. In sum, this textbook contributes to the visibility of these feminist critical approaches to peace research and makes them accessible to scholars and students interested in the subject.
This book will be of much interest to students of peace studies, feminist theory, gender studies and International Relations.
1. Feminist Peace Research: An Introduction
SECTION 1 – BODIES IN WAR AND PEACE
2. Conflicts and Wars as Corporeal Experiences
3. Female Combatants
4. Wartime Sexual Violence
5. The Gendered Dimensions of Forced Displacement
6. Post-Conflict Reconciliation and Memory Work
7. Embodied War Trauma and Postmemory
SECTION 2 – WAR AND PEACE: AN INTERSECTIONAL APPROACH
8. Matrices of Domination, Intersectionality and Violent Conflicts
9. Gendered images and roles during violent conflicts
10. Masculinities, Nationalism and Militarism
11. Feminist Approaches to Genocide
12. Feminist Analyses of War Economies
13. Youth, Conflict and Peace
SECTION 3 – SUBALTERNITY, ABJECTION AND SILENCING IN WAR AND PEACE
14. Decolonialising peacebuilding
15. Post-Conflict Silencing
16. Artificial Intelligence and Military Technologies
17. Alternative Ontologies and Conflict Transformation
18. Non-Human Animals in Military Institutions
SECTION 4 – ENABLING AND DISABLING ENVIRONMENTS
19. Continuums of Violence
20. Post-War Violence and Impunity
21. Disasters, Famines and Epidemics
22. Climate Crisis and Justice
23. Environmental Peacebuilding
SECTION 5 – POWER, RESISTANCE AND ACTIVISM
24. Power and Resistance in Peacebuilding
25. Feminist and Women’s Peace Activism
26. Everyday Peace
27. Peacebuilding and reconciliation through the arts
28. Epilogue: Feminist Imaginings of Peace
Biography
Élise Féron is Docent and Senior Research Fellow, Tampere Peace Research Institute, Tampere University, Finland.
Tarja Väyrynen is Professor at Tampere Peace Research Institute, Tampere University, Finland.
'This textbook is one of the top eye-opening books every scholar and practitioner involved in conflict resolution should read. In these terrible times, it is unique in at least three regards. First, it puts into question most preconceived ideas on war and peace. Second, it dissects embodied interactions and gendered dynamics during and after mass atrocities. Third, it boosts determination to favour collaboration and mutual support leading to everyday peace. An outstanding exercise of reflexivity.'
Valérie Rosoux, University of Louvain, Belgium
'This is an extremely valuable and highly-accessible contribution to the literature on Peace and Conflict Studies. Feminist research agendas have led the way on many aspects of peace and this book provides an excellent state-of-the-art summary on multiple themes. It will be a ‘'must add'’ to many reading lists.'
Roger Mac Ginty, Durham University, UK
'The timeliness of this textbook cannot be overstated. I have been in the Peace Studies field for over twenty-five years and have longed for a feminist textbook since the beginning of my career. What Élise Féron and Tarja Väyrynen have delivered is nothing short of extraordinary: a comprehensive introduction to the vast feminist work on peace and violence. In their nuanced and rich chapters on the variety of topics that feminists have tackled, they show how feminism transforms peace studies in multiple ways: it broadens our understanding of peace and violence to include subjects too often sidelined by the field; it challenges some of the premises or assumptions of much of peace studies work (for example, clear-cut peace-war cleavages); and it exposes the silences and marginalizations that the field has perpetuated, elevating actors and ways of thinking, which might well provide the world with alternative models for peaceful and just futures.'
Catia C. Confortini, Wellesley College, USA
'Féron and Väyrynen have done us a huge favour by writing this brilliant book that brings together the concepts and ideas that have both enthused and troubled feminists invested in the futures of peace. For all those interested in Feminist Peace Research, this much needed book would be a valuable resource and the very first important milestone in their journey.'
Swati Parashar, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
