Gender as an Analytic Lens for Agonistic Peace

Recent literature has identified a new avenue for approaching peace in the post-conflict sphere: agonistic peace. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s vision of radical democratic theory as well as post-structuralist accounts of identity, scholars have identified an emerging alternative to liberal peacebuilding practices (Strömbom, Murphy and Walsh). While much of the nascent scholarship on agonistic peace includes mentions of gender, the link between gender and a theory rooted in anti-essentialist, post-structural identity conceptions remains unclear. This paper fills this gap in the literature in three critical ways. First, it clarifies the points of theoretical overlap between certain strands of feminist theory and agonistic theory and explores the goals shared by proponents of each tradition. Second, it explores the justification of the application of agonistic theory to the post-conflict sphere and argues that this same logic justifies the inclusion of gender as a focus for agonistic peacebuilding praxis. Finally, it demonstrates the ways in which a post-conflict examination of gender can serve as a tool for identifying agonistic peace practices in empirical cases. The paper ultimately addresses the question of how to approach post-conflict treatment of gender without relying on essentialist qualities of womanhood.