From Liberal to Post-Liberal Peace: Critical Feminism in Critical Peace Studies

This paper engages with trends towards hybridisation and the ‘local turn’ in building peace through a critical feminist lens, demonstrating how this can both enrich existing work as well as challenge existing assumptions and categories. The paper sets out two areas in which critical feminist theory is essential to informing conceptual developments in ‘local’ forms of peacebuilding. First, critical feminist frameworks can be utilised to examine gendered relations of power at mission sites and within institutions themselves. While critical peace literature on hybridisation and localisation problematises relations of power between differently placed actors, it does this through the framework of ‘national’ and ‘international’ actors, without acknowledging how these may be gendered nor why that is important. Second, a critical feminist lens can be used to challenge how ‘national’ and ‘international’ spaces are currently conceptualised. For example, the Women, Peace and Security framework embedded in peace operations was born from a broad-based transnational feminist activism. Although it can be – and has been – problematically attached to peace operations, it represents a more dynamic process than simply transfer from ‘international’ to ‘local’ in post-conflict or fragile states. Understanding such dynamism opens up previously overlooked possibilities; for example, it is argualbe that some ‘international’ actors may be better allies for ‘local’ or ‘national’ actors to meet certain social, economic or political goals, rather than local political elite. A critical feminist lens can therefore be used to challenge constructed dichotomies that position interests around geographic/spatial relations. The paper argues that a more dynamic understanding of relations and processes between actors is needed, not simply as a moral or ethical obligation, but rather, that such interventions challenge simplified categories and are essential to building a more just peace.