peacebuilding Archives

Caring as a Practice of Everyday Peacemaking in the Lives of Sexual Violence Survivors in Kenya

By ISS Blog Bliss 23 September 2025 939 views

Earlier this year, Bilge Sahin and Phyllis Livaha, with support from Anne Biwott, organized a one-day workshop in collaboration with Grace Agenda—a Kenyan civil society organization that supports survivors of the 2007–2008 post-election violence. The workshop, held in Nairobi, focused on care and healing in the lives of survivors of sexual violence. The goal of the workshop was to shift the narrative from violence and victimhood toward one of agency—highlighting the everyday realities of survival, resilience, and the process of rebuilding life. This blog piece focuses specifically on the experiences of Jaqueline Mutere, founder and director of Grace Agenda, offering insight into the importance of healing and care. Her perspective sheds light on the often-overlooked roles women play in mitigating violence, sustaining families and communities, and fostering social cohesion during and after conflict. This blog has been put together in a specific narrative style, weaving together academic observations with the words of Jacqueline which are italicized for clarity.

“Together with other survivors that we work with, we offer care and support to others, to enable them work through their trauma”

In the field of peace and conflict studies, care is often overlooked—its significance overshadowed by the dominant focus on violence and suffering. This reflects broader biases in knowledge production and the privilege of certain narratives over others. Yet, when care is taken seriously in contexts of violence and armed conflict, it opens up space for a more nuanced understanding of how individuals and communities navigate recovery and ongoing violence. Recognizing that care and violence often coexist is essential to grasp the realities of rebuilding after conflict.

Crucially, centering care should not romanticize or erase the enduring pain and hardship survivors’ experience. Rather, care and violence often operate simultaneously. Efforts to heal and rebuild are ongoing and form a vital component of everyday peacebuilding. Understanding these care practices is essential to appreciating how resilience and recovery take shape in communities affected by conflict.

Fisher and Tronto define care as “everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.” This definition deepens in real life experiences:

“For a longtime after the birth of my baby, I struggled a lot with self-worth. Because this pregnancy was hidden and my body suffered through it, the post-natal care and recovery was no less brutal. But as soon as I realized that my children would suffer tremendous loss on so many levels, physically emotionally, economically…. It came to me that I need to recover FOR MYSELF so that I could give back to my children and give them the life they deserved, BUT…it all started with ME. So, I had to start the work internally, before reaching out to my children and doing damage control because I realized my internal turmoil had affected my personality and hence my relationships with those near and dear to me…I realized that my children would suffer at the hands of these who despised me. This realization hit me like a rock, but sparked a fire in me so deep. I started on a journey of daily self-reflection, first of all dealing with the historical bile that I felt for those around me in treating me like a pariah, and more so the perpetrator who intentionally inflicted this heinous offence of raping me.”

Building on Fisher and Tronto’s insights, we see that care is embedded in the everyday work of peacemaking. Peace is not merely the product of formal agreements or political transitions—it must be understood through the lived realities of those who have endured violence. For survivors, violence often continues to manifest in their daily lives, relationships, and bodies. Peace, then, becomes an ongoing, embodied effort—one that involves negotiating and resisting gendered, militarized, racialized, capitalist, and colonial structures. Therefore, for survivors of sexual violence, the impact of unresolved mental stress and the small acts of self-care help navigate their daily life, symbolizing ongoing healing and techniques for rebuilding peace:

“I have realized that when I have a lot of things on my mind that I have not processed and made decisions on, continue to nag me, robbing me of mental peace. This affects how I eat and sleep. Also, if my body doesn’t get enough rest, I get headaches and feel heavy the entire day. But if I get an opportunity per chance to take a power nap and calm the nerves through sleep. I realized waking up that the tautness in my body has left, I gain clarity of thought, able to process and conclude issues faster. This automatically puts me in a more positive mood. I love my house and a clean environment, I love and care for my plants, that I talk to when watering them. The green of the plants give me peace, seeing them flourish does something to my insides, and so I endeavor to maintain this equilibrium. What I wish I could do for myself is have the same energy for domestic, work that I had previously. But with age comes certain physical limitations and so with the added responsibilities of supporting others, I am not able to do as much as I would like to. What I still enjoy is cooking… for myself, for my children, for others, and making things work around me.”

A feminist understanding of peace locates its meaning not in political pronouncements but in the everyday lives of survivors—where acts of survival, care, and the pursuit of dignity become central to peacebuilding. In these everyday struggles and strategies, care—whether for oneself, for others, or received from others—emerges as foundational to life-making and community-sustaining practices.

“This process of realizing that because my children needed me, dawned on me that I was valuable to SOMEONE, my kids. This bloomed in me, awakening a flower of hope in me. With this realization I reflected on those who were not so lucky as me, who had no family, were orphaned and were going through the same trauma and journey of healing like me, those less fortunate and more vulnerable…. This flicker of fire grew to where I committed to make others better and not have to go through what a tunnel of blackness I had just overcame. This then has become my life`s work in supporting others to get back in touch with themselves after trauma of sexual violence and realize that it is not others who qualify your worth and value, But YOU!”

A feminist ethics of care resists essentialist and individualistic interpretations of survival. It recognizes that healing after sexual violence cannot rest on the shoulders of individuals alone. Instead, it requires collective efforts—relational networks of mutual support built on empathy, solidarity, and shared struggle among informal survivor networks or through grassroots organizations. Mutual support is at the center of Grace Agenda’s mission:

“Together with other survivors that we work with, we offer care and support to others, to enable them work through their trauma. Appreciating and realizing stigma (the silent derogatory ridicule) that survivors go through, we create an environment that one can be themselves and start on the journey of healing. Rape has a culture of silence, and together in solidarity we have come out to challenge the culture of silence around the violation. We came together to initiate Grace Agenda that speaks of Reparations for Sexual Violence, develop self-agency to speak for oneself your concept and perception of justice, and memorialize the journeys, to healing, championing the same for the impact of the violation like the children that have been born from rape”.

Among survivors and the civil society organizations that support them, networks often form around affection, trust, and a shared commitment to healing. These relationships address not only trauma but also the economic and social challenges that survivors face. As Browne et al. remind us: “given our interdependence and vulnerability, it is caring that sustains us and can therefore serve as a starting point for imaging a different kind of politics.”

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the authors:

Bilge Sahin is an Assistant Professor of Conflict and Peace Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her teaching and research explore the complex intersections of gender, sexuality, war, and security.

Phyllis Livaha is a senior lecturer at Erasmus University College, Rotterdam, where she teaches international law and international relations courses. Her research interests include women’s rights, human rights law and international relations. Her current work focuses on decolonization and critical (legal) analysis.

Jacqueline Mutere is the founder and director of Grace Agenda in Nairobi, Kenya, which she established in 2010 to support survivors of sexual violence during Kenya’s 2007–2008 post-election crisis. Her work, which initially focused on children born of rape, has grown to champion reparations, survivor dignity, and mental health recovery. Mutere has been nationally and internationally recognized for her leadership, including nominations and awards from Kenya’s Women Human Rights Defenders and Physicians for Human Rights. She serves on regional and global networks such as the East African Women Human Rights Defenders Network, the SEMA Network, and the Geneva Centre for Humanitarian Studies Steering Committee. She continues to mentor youth champions challenging stigma and has co-authored research on children born of sexual violence.

Anne Biwott works with grassroots organizations to challenge harmful gender norms and champion for equity and equality for all.

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A clash of peace(s)? Feminist-decolonial reckoning with extractive disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration (DDR) programmes in Africa

By ISS Blog Bliss 17 June 2025 1751 views

Conventional Disarmament, Demobilisation, and Reintegration (DDR) frameworks in Africa remain limited by masculinist and colonial legacies that marginalise the knowledge of African women’s and their lived realities. In this blog, visiting International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) researcher, Esther Beckley advances a feminist-decolonial intervention that centres women’s knowledge as indispensable to reimagining peacebuilding beyond militarised and exclusionary paradigms. This shift is essential for achieving effective peace processes.

**Photo by Alessandro Armignacco on Unsplash**

“We are not firing guns, but we are not at peace”. This sentiment, echoed by one of the women I encountered in Liberia during my PhD field research in 2022, encapsulates a critical challenge in “post-conflict” Africa. More than two decades have passed since the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (WPS), which prioritised women’s protection and participation in conflict and its aftermath. Hailed as a landmark in recognising women’s experiences of war and contributions to peace, the resolution laid the groundwork for gender-sensitive peacebuilding frameworks worldwide, including Disarmament, Demobilisation, and Reintegration (DDR) programmes.

Yet, in Africa, where histories of conflict and resistance continue to shape present realities, these frameworks remain largely extractive, technical, and blind to African women’s lived realities. They are extractive because they use women’s stories to fit donor agendas without truly listening to their needs. They are technical, relying on rigid checklists that ignore the complex ways women build peace daily. They are blind to the plural forms of African women’s peacebuilding that do not fit Western stereotypes. This creates a gap between peacebuilding frameworks and the real lives of the women they aim to support. This way, women’s agency is not only marginalised but actively erased through peacebuilding paradigms that are masculinist in design and colonial in logic.

In this article, I offer a feminist-decolonial reckoning with DDR in Africa – one that challenges the colonial roots and gender biases of these processes, and centres the voices and realities of African women so often ignored. Drawing on examples from Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Liberia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), I reflect on how DDR processes continue to operate through narrow definitions of combatant identity, exclusionary disarmament criteria, and a persistent inability to value women’s plural and communal approaches to peace. Beyond the question of inclusion, I ask: Which kinds of peace are being imagined? Whose security is being prioritised? And what violence is rendered invisible in the process? Doing so allows for a deeper understanding of how African women’s experiences can reshape peacebuilding into a more just and grounded practice.

Beyond the rhetoric of inclusion: The limits of gender mainstreaming

Women in Africa have never been absent from conflict. In Sierra Leone, figures like “Adama cut hand” and “Krio Mammy” embodied a complex warrior identity, challenging the stereotype of women as passive victims of war. In northeastern Nigeria, the widespread use of girls as suicide bombers by Boko Haram reveals a calculated militarisation of girlhood. Likewise, in Goma, DRC, some of the women I encountered in 2022 spoke of occupying roles as commanders, platoon leaders, logistics coordinators, and so forth. Yet, DDR programmes across Africa have persistently treated women’s participation in conflict as anomalous or secondary.

The problem is not just one of oversight; it is structural. DDR programmes are designed around a narrow, militarised conception of combatant status – one that centres gun ownership, formal enlistment, and the ability to surrender arms as prerequisites for recognition. In this framework, women who served as spies, cooks, caregivers, sex slaves, or who fought using traditional weapons such as machetes or “juju” (voodoo) are not seen as legitimate ex-combatants. As a result, they are excluded from reintegration benefits and left to “self-reintegrate” without psychological, social, or economic support.

This exclusion is not incidental. It reflects the coloniality of peacebuilding, a system that privileges Western top-down models and masculinist understandings of war, while delegitimising the complex and fluid roles women occupy during and after conflict. In Sierra Leone, female fighters within the Kamajor Civil Defence Forces were left out of DDR processes because they did not fit the predefined mould of the disarmed soldier. In Nigeria, women affected by the Niger Delta insurgency and the counterinsurgency war in the Northeast were similarly marginalised by state-led peace initiatives such as the Presidential Amnesty Programme and Operation Safe Corridor. These programmes, despite being framed within WPS language, failed to acknowledge the socio-political and gendered dynamics that shape women’s experiences of conflict and recovery.

“Informal” peacebuilding as epistemic resistance

In the face of structural exclusion from formal peace processes, African women have long practised peacebuilding on their own terms, drawing from cultural knowledge(s), spiritual resilience, and communal solidarity. These practices, often unseen by dominant DDR frameworks, constitute powerful forms of epistemic resistance – challenging dominant knowledge systems and asserting their own ways of knowing and being. In this context, it represents women’s active resistance to the narrow definitions of peace and peacebuilding embedded in DDR programmes. They offer plural ways of knowing and doing peace, rooted in collective healing, intergenerational memory, and care.

Consider Liberia, where women’s movements, notably Women in Peacebuilding Network (WIPNET), mobilised mass actions combining Christian and Muslim prayer circles, sit-ins, song, and silent protest. Their methods, born out of necessity and resilience, may not have resembled conventional conflict resolution, but their impact was undeniable. Through everyday activism, they created political pressure that eventually helped end the war and paved the way for the election of Africa’s first female head of state. These practices disrupt the distinction made between victim and agent, public and private, formal and informal, reclaiming peace as a communal, ongoing process rather than a set of steps to be completed.

These forms of peacebuilding are not simply add-ons to liberal peace processes; they expose how the “peace” envisioned in DDR and WPS agendas often neglects the violences women continue to endure in “post-conflict” contexts: domestic violence, land dispossession, political exclusion, illiteracy, and trauma. As one of the women in Liberia told me, “The war is over, but our struggle is not”. Their activism around issues like drug abuse, domestic violence, and declining female political representation, though not always labelled “peacebuilding”, is deeply political and rooted in relational justice and survival.

By ignoring these practices, DDR programmes perpetuate epistemic injustice. They continue to treat peacebuilding as a domain of expertise held by international actors and armed men, rather than a relational, lived process in which women are already engaged. Feminist-decolonial approaches compel us to ask: Which forms of knowledge are recognised as legitimate? Who is authorised to speak, and whose voices remain unheard?

Towards feminist-decolonial peacebuilding

For DDR in Africa to be truly meaningful, it must abandon its masculinist, militarised, and top-down foundations. A feminist-decolonial approach demands a radical reimagining beyond the standard three-step process. Disarmament must extend beyond weapons to acknowledge women’s unique experiences of war, while demobilisation must ensure safety and inclusion for female ex-combatants. Reintegration requires holistic healing that is psychological, spiritual, and relational, not just economic support. Crucially, we must ask what peace and reintegration mean for women whose bodies were sites for warfare and survival or who bore the burdens of conflict without wielding arms.

Central to this transformation is recognising African women’s knowledges such as prayer, storytelling, rituals, and care as vital peacebuilding practices that challenge the liberal peace framework. Tokenistic gender mainstreaming falls short because DDR must confront colonial legacies that marginalise women’s political labour and exclude them from decision-making. Feminist-decolonial peacebuilding calls for fundamentally reimagining peace as justice, dignity, and relational repair, emerging from communities rather than institutions. This is not a tweak but a reckoning and a shift toward liberation grounded in voices too often forgotten.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the Author

Esther Beckley is a visiting research fellow at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS). Her PhD research centered the peacebuilding practices of indigenous women in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Liberia, learning how they navigate and reshape complex ‘postconflict’ environments within their communities. Grounded in a feminist-decolonial approach, her work challenges dominant colonial narratives that have long silenced these women’s voices, foregrounding the significance of their spiritual, relational, and communal methods of building peace. This research provides critical insights into the limitations of conventional Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) programmes and emphasises the need for more transformative and contextually grounded peace processes.

Caring About Peace: Care as Inclusion and Transformation in Peacebuilding

By ISS Blog Bliss 29 February 202415 December 2024 3262 views

Drawing off interviews with peacebuilding practitioners working in Palestine, Sudan and Yemen, this blog considers how peacebuilding practices can be enhanced with a lens of care. How does centring care relations of interdependency impact what is understood as peacebuilding? How can decision making and participation become more inclusive? And what are the implications for the construction of Global North/South dichotomy informing humanitarian intervention?

Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) sits with the trouble of understanding the significance and ambivalence of care by stating “care is omnipresent, even through the effects of its absence” (p. 1). The ‘absence’ of care is particularly visible during conflict, as care tasks may become more urgent and challenging. Likewise, care relations are severed when people die or become displaced, and numbers of injured people requiring care may increase (Robinson, 2011 p. 96). In the context of peace and conflict, some scholars argue that care, and the gendered power relations that go with it, cuts through social practices (Vaittinen et al., 2019, p. 3).

With this framing of care, my thesis research sought to explore how peacebuilding with a care lens can enable inclusion and strengthen extant situated caring practices. I explored this in conversations with peacebuilding professionals implementing programs under the Dutch NAP-IV, Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women Peace and Security (WPS), in Palestine, Sudan and Yemen.

Analysis of peacebuilding programs with a care lens

Across three country contexts, every conversation revealed how care relations are constituted in a lineage of unequal power structures – specifically, colonialism, patriarchy, and racism.

These conversations revealed how without explicitly considering people with care roles and their specific needs, peacebuilding programs inadvertently excluded people with care roles in their approach. This exclusion is in direct contradiction to the NAP-IV outcome of increasing women’s equal and meaningful participation in decision-making in peace and security processes. Moreover, excluding people with care roles – who may face multiple aspects of structural marginalisation – impedes upon their needs, rights, expertise and experiences shaping the discourse of what peace and security means, for whom, and how it is attained. This exclusion furthers the devaluation and marginalisation of people who care – and the role of care itself – in society. So, , what could embedding a care lens add to these programs?

Embodying caring values: attentive listening and responding to needs

Practicing caring values such as attentive listening, patience, humility and seeking to understand the context can support better understanding and response to needs of affected communities in peacebuilding programs. This can include asking ‘How are care relations disrupted by the conflict? Have sites of care (e.g. community spaces and homes) been destroyed in the conflict? How are gendered dynamics impacted by the conflict? How are marginalised groups impacted by the conflict? Whose needs are being met, and whose are not?’ This echoes the recommendations in the Peace Direct et al. Decolonising Aid (2021) report where practitioners advised INGOs to “listen, listen, listen”, and “act with humility” (p. 36).

Designing to include

In my conversations with peacebuilding professionals, I heard examples of listening and responding to needs in practice. Based in Sudan, Amina* spoke of advising colleagues in the program, “Always, I tell them that we need to do our listening before conducting any activity in the community. Just go to the community, listen from them directly. Listen for the women, listen for their stories. And after that, let us come and sit and think and try to know the kind of intervention that we need for this community”. This practice of attentive listening, utilising relational ontology and situated knowledge of the context, can be embedded in the needs assessment prior to program design and implementation.

Based in Palestine, Sahar* reflected on a lack of understanding of unpaid care work as a barrier to participation: “This is a huge burden that might prevent women from engagement and participation in public life in general … we are talking about women’s political participation and participation in decision-making process”.

A needs assessment must embody an ethics of care, and be attuned to structural barriers to participation. Practically, this entails specifying who does the listening (e.g., someone with existing relations to the community), who is listened to (e.g., marginalised communities), and identifying existing relations of care and seeking to strengthen these, while being attuned to how different forms of power exist and are distributed in society, impacting relations of dependency as mutual or exploitative.

Having a more comprehensive understanding of the specific needs of people in a conflict-affected community can support inclusive program design, such as providing childcare during program events and scheduling events in times and places which are not restrictive for people to attend. Addressing these barriers enables peace and security discourse to be more reflective of the lived realities, needs and aspirations of all people affected by the conflict.

Implications for humanitarian intervention

Thinking about peace with a care lens supports us to centre a recognition of interdependence across national borders, and challenges the construction of power within the longstanding Global North/South dichotomy in humanitarian intervention. A care analysis highlights the capacity and expertise of people who are situated in a conflict-affected context to understand and respond to needs of particular others, as such relations of giving and receiving care exist before, during and after the conflict. This framing aligns with the broader localisation agenda.

This does not suggest international actors have no role or responsibility in supporting conflict-affected communities. Ethics of care highlights the experience of interconnected needs, dependency and vulnerability transcending national borders, and is attuned to the historical and ongoing impacts of colonisation which influence whose needs are met, and whose are not. From here, the role of humanitarian intervention must be to strengthen local activities/approaches, and redistribute resources to do this, rather than undermine or overshadow local initiatives.

Everyday peace theorists contend that without a consideration of how care operates in peace efforts “it follows that various mundane practices of caring that are crucial in creating trust and peaceful conflict transformation are either taken for granted, or remain invisible” (Vaittinen et al., 2019, p. 3). As the conflicts in Sudan, Yemen and Palestine continue and civilian deaths increase every day, care relations are severed, strained and remade. Humanitarian intervention must seek to strengthen mundane, everyday practices of care in efforts to support and sustain peace that is by, and for, people situated in the conflict context.

References

*Note, interview participant names changed to maintain anonymity

Peace Direct, Adeso, Alliance for Peacebuilding and Women of Color Advancing Peace and Security and Conflict Transformation. (2021) Time to Decolonial Aid – Insights and lessons from a global consultation. Peace Direct, London. Available at: PDDecolonising_Aid_Report_Second_Edition.pdf (peaceinsight.s3.amazonaws.com) (Accessed 19 October 2023).

Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017) ‘The Disruptive Thought of Care’, in Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (ed.) Matters of care: speculative ethics in more than human worlds. United Kingdom: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 1-24.

Robinson, F. (2011a) The Ethics of Care; A Feminist Approach to Human Security. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Vaittinen, T., Donahoe, A., Kunz, R., Bára Ómarsdóttir, S. and Roohi, S. (2019) ‘Care as everyday peacebuilding’, Peacebuilding, 7(2), pp. 194-209. doi: 10.1080/21647259.2019.1588453 https://doi.org/10.1080/21647259.2019.158845 3.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author:

Ebony Westman holds a MA in Development Studies, specialising in Peace and Conflict Studies from ISS (2023) and a MA in Gender Studies from Utrecht University (2017). Ebony is committed to intersectional gender advocacy and exploring this in the context of peace, conflict and care.

Mind the Queer Gap: Bisexual Invisibility in the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda

By ISS Blog Bliss 23 January 202415 December 2024 3260 views

With several ongoing conflicts, researcher Isabella Cordua considers how Bisexual invisibility in general has contributed to a lack of attention paid to Bisexual people in conflict, and calls for more focus to be placed on LGBTQI+ people, and Bisexual people in particular in the WPS Agenda. [

The LGBTQ+ community worldwide continues to grapple with violence, discrimination, and marginalisation, all of which are intensified during conflicts. Reports of violence are all too common – last year, a store owner in the United States was killed following a dispute over displaying a rainbow Pride flag outside her business. Meanwhile, in Uganda, a 20-year-old man faces “aggravated homosexuality” charges, punishable by death under recent homophobic legislation. In Australia, a new report shows that one in two transgender Australians have experienced online and offline anti-trans hate this year, intensified by the proliferation of unchecked anti-trans rhetoric.

However, there is a significant lack of efforts targeted at addressing violence against the queer community, especially during conflict. Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (WPS), adopted by the Security Council in 2000, largely neglects LGBTQ+ experiences. This oversight persists even though the hatred directed at members of the LGBTQ+ community is fundamentally rooted in the same harmful gender norms and heteronormative female/male binary that create a permissive space for violence against women and girls.

Obtaining LGBTQ+ statistics, especially in countries that criminalise identities outside of the heteropatriarchal binary, can be difficult. However, a study in the US, Canada, Australia, and Norway found that bisexuals make up the majority of the LGBTQ+ community. Paradoxically, they remain under-researched and overlooked by the peace and security community, even when we consider the lack of focus around LGBTQ+ people as a whole.

Bisexual Invisibility in Society as a whole

Bisexual people often receive limited support and representation within the LGBTQ+ community, leading to minimal dedicated efforts and funding, of which bisexual women, for example, receive less than 1%. Bisexual men face even greater invisibility due to social stigma, and programming for bisexual genderqueer individuals is virtually non-existent.

The term bisexuality has long been the subject of debate. While it is assumed that the prefix “bi” refers to attraction to only two genders, bisexuality is better understood as homosexual and heterosexual attraction. Thus, bisexuality is a radical critique of heteronormative patriarchal morals and monosexual identity.

Compounded Vulnerabilities of Queer and Bisexual Individuals in Conflict

Bisexual individuals tend to be excluded from both heteronormative culture and the LGBTQ+ community, especially when they are in heterosexual relationships. They are labelled as “confused” or merely going through a “phase”. Exclusion thus occurs twice: deemed “too gay” and “too straight” at once, they are pressured to conform to monosexual norms and often feel “alienated” and emotionally “homeless.”

The pressure to conform to hegemonic masculine norms can endanger bisexual men, whose sexuality may be seen as conflicting with societal expectations of the “real man”. Top of FormBottom of Form Meanwhile, bisexual women may face comparable discrimination and abuse to lesbians when they are in same-sex relationships or express same-sex desires, betraying patriarchal assumptions around women’s perceived dependence on men.

Bisexuals often feel compelled to conceal their sexual orientation, particularly during conflicts, to conform to societal norms. While the ability to “pass” as heterosexual may be seen as a privilege, the necessity to do so to avoid harm constitutes a form of violence in itself.

Bisexuals’ nonconformity can see them stereotyped as promiscuous and untrustworthy. These harmful perceptions make them more vulnerable to sexual and gender-based violence, particularly “corrective” rape perpetrated in an effort to “cure” them. In sexually repressive communities, these stereotypes heighten risks, driven by the urge to control bodies, particularly female bodies, and sexuality against heteropatriarchal norms.

Since violence and targeting of those who do not conform to hegemonic masculinity intensify amid conflict, bisexual people’s challenge to binary expressions of sexual orientation deserves greater attention from peace and conflict specialists. To start with, the WPS agenda needs to be reframed to better accommodate intersectional gender perspectives that address the multiple ways that gendered discrimination is experienced. This approach can provide better insights for addressing violence in both times of peace and war.

Expanding Gender Inclusion in the WPS Agenda

Resolution 1325 marked a shift in recognising women in conflict beyond victimhood, yet embraced an essentialist interpretation of their role. Critics argue that the WPS agenda conflates ‘women’ and ‘gender,’ promoting a binary view and limiting its focus to cisgender, heteronormative women, ignoring broader gender perspectives in conflict.

This binary and essentialist approach limits the scope and effect of the WPS agenda, which fails to address any departure from the ideal of the “asexual good woman.” Expressions of sexuality challenging this norm are seen as barriers to women’s participation in peace efforts. Indeed, the WPS agenda overlooks lesbian, bisexual, and transgender women, leaving their unique experiences of conflict-related violence unaddressed.

As is, the WPS agenda fails to recognise that all forms of gender-based violence stem from harmful gender norms that perpetuate the subordination of women and devalue femininity in favour of a specific hegemonic masculinity. This omission alienates gay and bisexual men and transgender and non-binary individuals, who face violence due to their identities and sexual orientation. It also hinders conflict resolution efforts and perpetuates the invisibility of queer experiences.

To truly address gendered violence in conflict and promote lasting peace, the WPS agenda must evolve to include the experiences of LGBTQ+ individuals. Queerness can be a major factor that makes individuals vulnerable to violence in conflict settings and needs to be better understood.

The bisexual community navigate unique challenges due to their defiance of heteropatriarchal norms and monosexual morals. Yet, their experiences remain invisible also because they are often grouped within the broader LGBTQ+ framework, which is itself overlooked.

Image Credit: https://stock.adobe.com/ie/images/a-rainbow-flag-standing-tall-amid-the-destruction-of-war-lgbtq-pride-flag/631638932

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author:

Isabella Cordua is a Rotary Peace Fellow at the University of Queensland. Before receiving the fellowship, Isabella worked as Research Coordinator at the Network for Empowered Aid Response (NEAR). She has previously led research and advocacy for other renowned organisations, including Global Insight, the Cyrus R. Vance Center for International Justice, AdvocAid, and Defence for Children Sierra Leone.

Moving beyond women as victims in post-conflict peacebuilding efforts in Liberia by Christo Gorpudolo

By ISS Blog Bliss 27 January 202016 May 2020 2655 views

Liberia, a war-torn country for much of the 1990s, initiated several post-conflict peacebuilding programmes with the hope of building sustainable peace. But a study of the Palava Hut Program as a transitional justice mechanism showed that such efforts can be thwarted by the reduction of women to victims of war. The opportunity to rebuild gender relations damaged during wars can be missed in the process. Besides rethinking the link between women and victimhood, women’s inclusion in peacebuilding programmes based on lived experiences can help to equalize men and women in the peacebuilding process, argues Christo Gorpudolo.

Gender is one of the most damaged relationships during war. War and masculinity re-establishes gender hierarchies, and even after the end of wars such oppressive gender relationships persist. Several post-conflict peacebuilding efforts have been initiated in Liberia following two civil wars that occurred between 1989 and 2003. Most notable amongst these peacebuilding efforts have been the development of document called ‘A Strategic Roadmap for National Healing, Peacebuilding and Reconciliation and the National Palava Hut Program. These efforts are major achievements that have set the pace for peacebuilding in the country. Yet, as important as these peacebuilding efforts seem, how gender is viewed and incorporated within the country’s transitional peacebuilding programmes remains problematic for efforts to build sustainable peace.

Solhjell and Sayndee (2016) assert that Liberia has dominate-subservient gender power relations, which limits the participation of the female gender in public discourses and also affects their bodily integrity by limiting their movement from one social class to the other, especially in public decision-making processes (Solhjell and Sayndee 2016: 12). These general societal perspectives and/or biases of gender roles in Liberia have been key sources for policies informing the transitional justice process.

Gender can be viewed as a social institution that establishes patterns of expectations for individuals, orders the social processes of everyday life, and is built into the major social organizations of society such as the economy, ideology, the family and politics. It is an entity in and of itself (Lorber 1996). In the case of Liberia’s peacebuilding efforts, gender is constructed mostly in terms of women’s numerical inclusion in post-conflict peacebuilding activities. This is based on the generally accepted notion that women form a large portion of those victimized in the civil wars. Therefore, policy makers assume that they should be integrated into the Palava Hut talks numerically to share their stories of survival and receive apologies for the crimes committed against them. Although this assertion could be true, viewing women’s participation based on the lens of victimhood also poses a danger.

As part of my Master’s research at the ISS, in 2019 I conducted a case study of Liberia’s National Palava Hut Program as a transitional justice mechanism. Using Scriven’s argumentation analysis, I examined national policies that included the Palava Hut Program documents, related program evaluations and implementation reports, and the Strategic Roadmap for National Healing, Peacebuilding and Reconciliation. I specifically looked at issues of gender, including women’s representation in such policies. I found that victims in the studied documents generally referred to women and children. Based on this perception of women and children as victims, the documents advised that women should form part of the Palava Hut Talks to protect their rights that had been violated during the civil war and to address the ‘dishonour’ brought against them by the civil wars.

As important as those statements might sound, this fails to recognize the key role women played in ending direct violence in Liberia. Thus, women should be incorporated into the Palava Hut Program as significant stakeholders in Liberia’s peacebuilding process, not as victims. Viewing women as victims and men as perpetrators within the peacebuilding process can prevent the full realization of sustainable peace through peacebuilding efforts and hinders the possibility for the transitional era to be used as an opportunity to redefine existing gender relations. According to scholars like Catherine O’Rourke (2013), the extreme social disruption caused by political violence that a transitional justice era seeks to address can within the transitional era allow for some loosening of gender norms and create space for women to take up atypical gender roles. This can help reshape gender relations.

A way of approaching peacebuilding in Liberia in order to achieve a gender-just peacebuilding process would be to incorporate both men and women in the peacebuilding process based on their lived experiences—as equals and not necessarily according to a victim-perpetrator dichotomy. Considering lived experiences may help shift the focus of the Palava Hut Program past victims and perpetrators, thereby creating a deeper understanding of the conflict. This would also provide an opportunity to change gender-damaged relationships that persist in post-conflict societies, particularly Liberia.

References:

Lorber, J. (1996) ‘Beyond the Binaries: Depolarizing the Categories of Sex, Sexuality, and Gender’, Socological Inquiry 66(2): 143-160.

O’Rourke, C. (2013) Gender Politics in Transitional Justice. Routledge.

Solhjell, R. and T.D. Sayndee (2016) ‘Gender-Based Violence and Access to Justice: Grand Bassa County, Liberia’

About the authors:

Christo Z. Gorpudolo is a graduate of Development Studies, Social Justice Perspectives (SJP) from the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS).

Tag Archives peacebuilding

References:

Lorber, J. (1996) ‘Beyond the Binaries: Depolarizing the Categories of Sex, Sexuality, and Gender’, Socological Inquiry 66(2): 143-160.

O’Rourke, C. (2013) Gender Politics in Transitional Justice. Routledge.

Solhjell, R. and T.D. Sayndee (2016) ‘Gender-Based Violence and Access to Justice: Grand Bassa County, Liberia’