Advances in Feminist Peace Research: New Perspectives on War, Familial Ties, and Ongoing Legacies of Armed Conflict

Abstract

Feminist peace research (FPR) has been instrumental in revealing gendered continuums of violence spanning war and peace. FPR centres gendered lived experiences and applies an intersectional lens to expose exclusions - of individuals, experiences, and structures - in macro-level approaches to conflict transition (Väyrynen et al. 2021; Vaittinen et al. 2019). By highlighting these exclusions, FPR draws attention to micro-level processes that sustain insecurity - or alternatively, foster peace. Dominant narratives of conflict often reproduce gendered stereotypes, such as the (masculine) “Just Warrior” protecting the (feminine) “Beautiful Soul” (Elshtain 1995). FPR scholarship challenges these essentialist discourses, showing how they silence discussion of the long-lasting impacts of conflict - including psychological, physical, and intergenerational trauma, and the gendered insecurities that persist and intensify during and after conflict (e.g. Rai, True and Tanyag, 2019). This panel offers fresh perspectives on how we theorise the aftermaths of war and possibilities of peace, by focusing on relations and temporalities that remain under-explored in existing FPR scholarship. First, the panel delves deeper into family and familial ties as crucial sites that enable and sustain war, and potential sites for rebuilding lives after wars end. Building on feminist theories of social reproduction (Rai, Hoskyns and Thomas, 2014; Hedström, 2025), the panel advances a nuanced theorisation of the dynamic relationship between familial ties and war’s violence. It poses key questions such as: • How to theorise family not only as a ‘militarised’ social institution but as a realm of affective ties? • How do familial ties shape women’s participation in armed groups and how to examine this relationship through a feminist lens? • How to capture fatherhood and motherhood as relational identities in war and peace without reproducing gendered binaries? Second, several papers examine longer legacies or ‘afterlives’ (Wilson, 2023) of war. This strand establishes crucial links between FPR and Memory Studies, scholarship on intergenerational trauma, and anthropological literature on revolution. This opens new avenues to understand the often ‘contradictory’ aftermaths of war, including the transformations in gender relations that wars set in motion. The panel explores this through key questions such as: • How does ‘militarized social reproduction’ (Hedström 2021) evolve in the longer aftermaths of war, and can we theorise it in relation to peace? • How might parenthood become a site of sustaining revolutionary values and embodiments amid political disillusionment? • How do gendered experiences of war violence and mechanisms of resilience developed to survive war travel across generations? The concepts of ‘trans-generational memory’ and ‘afterlives’ open new feminist avenues to rethink temporalities of war and ‘post’-war, including the familiar narratives of ‘return’ and re-integration that continue to inform scholarship and practice of peacebuilding. Exploring how war memories travel across generations with feminist lenses enables us to develop different frames of looking (Wachsmuth 2008, Jacobs 2023) and understanding the long-term impact of armed conflict. It opens a space to make visible the different ways familial ties (Ketola and O’Reilly, 2025) condition the transmission of war experiences, trauma and mechanisms of resilience (Gitau 2022, Berry 2022), across generations post-conflict.

Title	Details
Militarised Familial Ties and Women’s Participation in Fighting Forces: Insights from Bosnia & Herzegovina	View Paper Details
Fatherhood, Familial Ties and Expectation of Masculinity in Times of Conflict: Exploring fatherhood in Nuer and Toposa communities in South Sudan	View Paper Details
‘We need to find the rhythm of life’: Familial afterlives of revolutionary struggle	View Paper Details
Exploring Women’s Experiences of War Violence and Survival in a Transgenerational Perspective.	View Paper Details