The expertisation of gender work in peacebuilding

This paper focuses on a key dynamic animating the field of gender and peacebuilding: ‘expertization’, i.e. the process that involves turning gender work into an expertise activity and the increasing valorisation of, and reliance on, the authority and skills of expert knowledge and practice in transforming gender relations. Advocates of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda welcome the important role that gender expertise plays in global efforts to implement and localize UNSCR 1325 as a key site of gender and peacebuilding. Critics suggest that expertise-based international gender and peacebuilding initiatives contribute to entrench neo-liberal and neo-colonial agendas detrimental to feminist solidarity. In this paper, I focus on the forms of feminist dis/connections that happen in the context of the expertization of gender and peacebuilding, including initiatives linked to the WPS agenda as well as initiatives that are positioned or position themselves in exteriority to the WPS agenda. Drawing on conversations with various actors who are involved in gender and peacebuilding in Nepal and have encountered gender expertise in various ways, I document moments/spaces of feminist dis/connections in this context. Inspired by insights from feminist (and) post/decolonial literature, I propose to conceptualise the building of feminist connections through what I call the ‘dynamic void’.