Women and Politics of Peace
South Asia Narratives on Militarization, Power, and Justice
- Rita Manchanda - Research Director, South Asia Forum for Human Rights, Delhi
This book discusses the experiences of women negotiating conflict and post-conflict situations to deliver transformative peace.
Inspired by the vision and values of women of the South Asian Peace Network, this volume fills a critical gap in the global Women, Peace and Security (WPS) discourse. The chapters focus on the region’s multifaceted experiences and feminist expertise on women negotiating post-war/post-conflict situations structured around interlinked themes - women, participation and peacebuilding; militarization and violent peace; and justice, impunity, and accountability.
This volume looks at the efforts of women trying to deliver a transformative peace that questions gendered power relations while confronting the socio-cultural barriers that prevent them from participating in rebuilding conflict-affected societies to bring about just peace.
The book is a valuable contribution to the academic literature, especially researchers in women and peace studies. The bibliography after each article is extensive which shows that all the articles have been well researched and written.
The book, like much of the work exploring the relationship between gender and violent politics at that time, sought to look at how women in South Asia were not just passive victims, but actively negotiating their lives around and with political conflict in countless ways. The book was perhaps the first study of its kind offering a comparative framework and a new understanding of women’s experiences with conflict in the South Asian contexts. The book once again draws our attention to what is common to all the conflicts in the region, besides the fact that they inhabit the same geography: the experience of the colonial rule; the democratic and developmental deficit in the region; the post-colonial state’s inability to address political tensions that arise as a result, without resorting to (gendered) force; and the hold patriarchy has on South Asian societies. Perhaps, the most important question that the book, therefore, raises is which of these features, separately or together, explain the relative failure of South Asian peace processes to include women in comparison with experiences of countries like Liberia and Rwanda?
