Feminist approaches to regional peace and security in the Global South

Abstract

The increasingly formidable body of research on gender, peace and security within critical and feminist peace research and beyond offers important avenues for examining the gendered aspects of security governance – in policy and practice. While the Global South is studied as the setting where conflicts and violence take place, and where interventions of global security mechanisms are required, regional security actors in the Global South have merited surprisingly limited analysis. This is puzzling as these actors, including regional(ized) organisations and civil-society groups, have been recognized for their central role in peace and security. Addressing this gap, this panel brings together feminist analysis of diverse regional security actors and practices with the analyses of feminist strategies within regional security institutions in the Global South. What kinds of knowledges are to be gained from feminist methodological and theoretical approaches to regional peace and security? Which omissions can these lenses uncover and how might they help in reimagining security practices in new and innovative ways? We integrate these discussions with empirical realities: Which concrete actors drive feminist regional security agendas and which practices do they engage in? What institutional and civil-society formations are enabling and challenging gendered approaches to peace and security? By drawing on diverse cases, this panel seeks to challenge common imaginaries of international power hierarchies and enable situated engagement with understudied and marginalised actors. The panel highlights how gender intersects with other categories of marginalisation and explores how synergies may be built from the struggles for inclusive approaches to regional peace and conflict governance. The aim of the panel is to foreground the agency of non-Western security actors. In doing so, we seek to demonstrate the relevance of coupling feminist lenses with deep contextual understanding of regional security processes in the Global South.

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