Defining Critical Feminist Justpeace: Women's Peacebuilding Praxis and Feminist Political Thought

The central concerns of my dissertation are the meaning of gender-just peace and the methods for pursuing it. Entering an ongoing debate within peace studies about the United Nations’ top-down, institutions-oriented “liberal peace,” I use ethnographic research with women’s peacebuilding groups in India alongside feminist political thought to argue for a “critical feminist justpeace,” developed from the bottom-up and taking the diverse experiences of marginalized women as motivation. Women in Manipur, India, try to build peace across ethnic, religious, and class-based boundaries. I analyze their practices, synthesizing them into a peacebuilding “praxis”—reflection combined with action with the goal of transformation—which we can fruitfully compare to Western feminist thought. This comparison of praxis and theory suggests that where the liberal peace fails women, a radically inclusive critical feminist justpeace will come closer to success. Such a peace is never achieved, but is rather an on-going process of contestation and relationship-building across divisions of power and privilege.