Intelligent Compassion traces changes in the ideas and policies of the longest-living international women's organization between 1945 and 1975. Focusing on disarmament, decolonization and the Middle East, it finds answers to IR questions about the possibility of emancipatory agency in the theoretical practices of women peace activists.
The Womens International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) has a unique role in post-war peace activism. It is the longest-surviving international womens peace organization and one of the oldest peace organizations in the West. Founded in 1915, when a group of women from neutral and belligerent nations in World War I met at The Hague to formulate proposals for ending the war, WILPF sent delegations of women to several countries to plead for peace, and their final resolutions are often credited with influencing Woodrow Wilsons 14 Points. Today, the organization counts several thousand members in 36 countries, on five continents. Since 1948, it has enjoyed consultative status with the UN, and it was instrumental in bringing about recent United Nations Security Council Resolutions on Women, Peace and Security. Beginning in 1945, WILPF began identifying the limitations of its ideological foundations in relation to the international liberal order. Catia Cecilia Confortini argues that this period ushered in a turn in the organizations policies and activism, one that culminated in the mid-70s and served as an important antecedent to feminist activism that continues today. In Intelligent Compassion, she traces the organizations changing strategies and ideas over a thirty-year period, focusing on three key areas of its work-disarmament, decolonization, and the conflict in Israel/Palestine. By analyzing the shifting ideas and policies of the longest-living international womens peace organization, Intelligent Compassion finds answers to IR questions about the possibility of emancipatory agency in the theoretical methodology of women peace activists and the extent to which activists can transcend the prevailing practices, rules and relations of their eras.
Good addition to handbooks programme, no direct competitiors HIST section of ISA is growing each year Faced with an uncertain future, an increasing number of scholars have looked to the past for guidance, patterns and ideas. This tendency has been clear, despite theoretical and methodological difference, this book will fill a lacuna.
This book offers a comparative lens on the contested relationship between two leading conflict resolution norms: ethnopolitical power-sharing pacts and the women, peace and security (WPS) agenda. Championed by national governments and international organizations over the last two decades, power-sharing and feminist scholars and practitioners tend to view them as opposing norms. Critics charge that power-sharing scholars cast gender as an inconsequential political identity that does not motivate people like ethnonationalism. From a feminist perspective, such thinking serves the interests of ethnicized elites while excluding women and other marginalized communities from key sites of political power. This edited volume takes a different tack: while recognizing the gender gaps that still exist in power-sharing theory and practice, contributors also emphasize the constructive engagements that can be built between ethnopolitical power-sharing and gender inclusion. Three main themes are highlighted: The ‘gender silences’ of existing power-sharing arrangements The impact of gender activism and advocacy on the negotiation and implementation of power-sharing pacts in divided societies The opportunities for linkages between power-sharing and the women, peace and security agenda. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Nationalism and Ethnic Politics.
The field of conflict resolution has evolved dramatically during the relatively short duration of the discipline’s existence. Each generation of scholars has struggled with the major puzzles of their era, providing theories and solutions that meet the needs of the time, only to be pushed forward by new insights and, at times, totally upended by a changing world. This introductory course text explores the genealogy of the field of conflict resolution by examining three different epochs of the field, each one tied to the historical context and events of the day. In each of these epochs, scholars and practitioners worked to understand and address the conflicts that the world was facing, at that time. This book provides a framework that students will carry with them far into their careers, enriching their contributions and strengthening their voices. Rather than a didactic approach to the field, students will develop their critical analytical skills through an inductive inquiry. Students will broaden their vocabulary, grapple with argumentation, and develop critical reading skills.
In Among Women across Worlds, Suzy Kim explores the transnational connections between North Korean women and the global women's movement. Asian women, especially communists, are often depicted as victims of a patriarchal state. Kim challenges this view through extensive archival research, revealing that North Korean women asserted themselves from the late 1940s to 1975, before the Korean War began and up to the UN's International Women's Year. Kim centers on North Korea and the "East" to present a new genealogy of the global women's movement. Women of the Korean Democratic Women's Union (KDWU), part of the global left women's movement led by the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF), argued that family and domestic issues should be central to both national and international debates. They highlighted the connections between race, nationality, sex, and class in systems of exploitation. Their intersectional program proclaimed "no peace without justice," "the personal is the political," and "women's rights are human rights," long before Western activists adopted these ideas. Among Women across Worlds uncovers movements and ideas foundational to today's era.
With existing literature focusing largely on Western perspectives of peace and their applications, a global understanding of peace is much needed. Spurred by more recent debates and discourses that criticize the dominant realist and liberal approaches for crises in contemporary state- and peace-building, the contributors to this handbook emphasize not only the need to solve this eternal conundrum of humanity, but also demand—with the rise of increasingly more violent conflicts in international relations—the development of a global interpretive framework for peace and security. To this end, the present handbook examines conceptual, institutional and normative interpretive approaches for making, building and promoting peace in the context of roles played by state and non-state actors within local, national, regional, and global units of analysis.
Passed in 2000, the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 and subsequent seven Resolutions make up the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda. This agenda is an international policy framework addressing the gender-specific impacts of conflict on women and girls, including protection against sexual and gender-based violence, promotion of women's participation in peace and security processes and support for women's roles as peace builders in the prevention of conflict and rebuilding of societies after conflict. The handbook addresses the concepts and early history behind WPS; international institutions involved with the WPS agenda; the implementation of WPS in conflict prevention and connections between WPS and other UN resolutions and agendas.
Compiling state-of-the-art research from 58 leading international scholars, this dynamic Handbook explores the evolution of feminist analytical and organising principles and their introduction into governance institutions in national, regional and global settings.
Through an ethnographic study of gender training practices in peacekeeping institutions, Aiko Holvikivi examines how gender is conceptualised, taught, and learned in these settings, and with what political effects. She finds that this training constitutes a deeply ambivalent practice from the point of view of intersectional feminist political commitments. Drawing on queer and postcolonial feminist thought, Fixing Gender examines the contradictory politics of gender training, arguing that we need to develop the analytical tools to grapple with paradoxical practices that are simultaneously good and bad feminist politics.
