Navigating Friction: Women’s Peacebuilding in Hybrid Regimes

In international peacebuilding paradigms, women’s organizations in conflict-affected contexts are often represented as essential peacebuilding partners. However, most conflict-affected states are authoritarian or hybrid regimes that routinely restrict the space for civil society and seek to achieve stability and order through state co-optation, coercion and repression of political challengers. While feminist peacebuilding scholarship has focused its critique on the frictional encounters between local women’s organizations and international liberal peacebuilding, it has not sufficiently explored how women’s peacebuilding practices are shaped by authoritarian state policies. Drawing on interviews with women activists in and from Sri Lanka and Myanmar, this article begins to address this gap through an analysis of how women’s organizations negotiate the contradictory constraints and pressures emerging from their relationships with international peacebuilding partners and donors as well as with state authorities. Extending previous feminist work on friction in global-local encounters, we argue that friction is manifested as tensions and conflicts in three different types of relationships: between women’s organizations and international peacebuilding; between women’s organizations and state governance; and between international peacebuilding and state governance. Thereby the article contributes to a fuller understanding of the political conditions that shape the peacebuilding practices of women’s organizations, and about the ways in which they mobilize to navigate these conditions.