Women, Peace and Security

The subordination of women to men is a powerful but invisible force that shapes international politics, economics, and security. Putting Women in their Place centers these lopsided power dynamics to examine how gender hierarchy both drives international dynamics and conditions how men and women experience things.

By critically assessing the ways gender norms shape political decision-making, economic development and financial disparities, and violence and conflict, Hilary Matfess expertly explains complex concepts and provides a compelling, approachable framework for interpreting global politics. This book weaves together personal stories, policy analysis, and the latest research to reveal the intertwining nature of gender oppression and systems of power, from local communities to the United Nations. It also offers a roadmap for rethinking world affairs through a feminist lens that foregrounds women’s agency, individuality, and varied motivations.

Women, Peace and Security in Afghanistan analyses the opportunities and limitations of the WPS agenda in the context of the world’s worst erasure of women’s rights.

Afghan women have long resisted war, violence and political exclusion, yet their struggles remain largely overlooked in global peace and security debates. This book examines how Afghan women’s activism has reshaped the fight for rights and freedom. Through feminist pragmatist grounded normative theorising, Afghan women’s diverse voices, strategies, and lived realities are made visible across war, peace and politics. From international military intervention and peacemaking deals to current engagement and non-engagement with the Taliban, this book is an urgent call to recognise and support women’s agency in the face of oppression.

The book explores how the WPS agenda in the region is imagined, interpreted and implemented.

The Middle East and North Africa exhibit many of the features the WPS agenda seeks to redress, such as historical grievances, discriminatory legal systems, economic and gender inequality, and fragility marked by violence, extremism and protracted displacement. The region is highly militarized by prolonged conflicts, and the enduring occupation of Palestine. These conditions lead to sexual and gender-based violence that disproportionally affect women and their effective and meaningful participation in conflict prevention and resolution.

This volume examines how women’s and feminist groups engage with peace and security issues. It analyses what they have gained from WPS, and how local women’s activism may either clash or overlap with WPS. It also looks at how women in the region understand peace and security beyond the confines of WPS, or if they are confined to women’s issues.

The prevention of Conflict-related Sexual Violence (CRSV) often relies on states to lead prevention and response mechanisms at the domestic level. However, state actors, such as the military, are frequently responsible for this violence. Can states play an effective role in preventing and responding to CRSV?

Conflict-Related Sexual Violence in Myanmar: The Role of the State provides a deeper understanding of the state's role as a prevention actor and explains why strategies aimed at preventing CRSV often fail and can sometimes even result in more harm.

Myanmar is a politically complex state that has experienced several decades of armed conflict, persistent military regimes, and a high prevalence of CRSV incidents committed by the state armed forces, the Tatmadaw. The book offers unique insights into CRSV prevention efforts in Myanmar, tracing the implementation process of the Joint Communiqué (JC), an agreement signed between the Myanmar government and the United Nations to effectively prevent and respond to CRSV.

This book is based on a comprehensive qualitative analysis of internal and public documents, and interviews with multiple stakeholders over a two-year period. It reveals how the gendered power structure and formal and informal practices of Myanmar’s state institutions constantly impeded the implementation process of the JC and offered a very limited political opportunity structure for local women’s CSOs to be involved in the JC implementation. A significant portion of the data in this book was collected in 2021 following the military coup in Myanmar. The author describes her experiences as a local researcher in solidarity with the local research participants experiencing the brutality of the military crackdown and conducting data collection in a particularly challenging context.

Moral Power Games in Foreign Policy explains how gendered foreign policy practices reproduce national identity and enable enhanced moral power in international relations. Using the cases of Russia and Sweden, it demonstrates how moral power games take place in the international realm as contending national values and gendered foreign policy practices collide.

Between 2012 and 2022, Russia and Sweden reflected the increasingly polarised international landscape wherein foreign policies emphasising the protection of traditional values and explicitly feminist foreign policies emerged. Russia has been pursuing a revisionist foreign policy informed by traditional values to advance national interests and outcomes. At the same time, Sweden became a leading state practising and advocating a feminist foreign policy. Moral Power Games in Foreign Policy analyses these relational international dynamics.

Using Ukraine as a case study, the book interrogates how the reproduction of Russian and Swedish national identities through gendered foreign policy practices is implicated in moral power games.

In March 2019, ISIS was territorially defeated. ISIS members were captured and detained: men were sent to prison and women and children to camps in northern Syria. This is an unprecedented situation where for the first-time thousands of female members of a terrorist group are detained in a foreign country without access to legal mechanisms, rehabilitation or reintegration measures. What happens to the foreign women (and children) who are not repatriated from the camps? If they are repatriated, are there rehabilitation and reintegration programmes in place that account for the experiences the women had?

Most existing rehabilitation and reintegration programmes are gender-neutral; that is, they claim to be universal, and are not tailored specifically to male or female beneficiaries. Yet, typically, these programmes are influenced by implicit gender norms and assumptions, such as that men are violent perpetrators of aggression and women are victims who are peaceful and lack agency. Alongside gender norms, intersecting racial and religious dynamics also shape how governments handle the repatriation, rehabilitation and reintegration of ISIS returnees. This includes racial profiling, the conflation between Islam and extremism and more broadly the rising Islamophobia in many countries, particularly since the ‘War on Terror’. These dynamics lead to an absence of rehabilitation and reintegration programmes specifically designed for women’s diverse experiences, which is the subject of this book.

Returning Home examines state responses to repatriation, rehabilitation and reintegration of ISIS returnees from an intersectional perspective, with a focus on ISIS women returnees. This book addresses the biased understandings that are built into scholarship and policy responses that reinforce gendered and racialized inequalities. It outlines how these dynamics can be uncovered and redressed by designing policies that are responsive to gender differences, inequalities and harmful norms.

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Due to the international importance attached to the reporting of conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) over the last two decades, scholars have been able to examine the magnitude of the problem across different situations and types of conflict. But what changes to intensity and type of violence occur during different phrases of conflict intensity? Is reporting consistent across different conflicts and different regional experiences of conflict-related SGBV? This book examines different conflict situations in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia over the past decade, 2010–2020.

The chapters in the book use a mixed-method approach to explore the patterns of violence in situations of one-sided violence, state-led violence, non-state-led violence, low intensity violence, terrorism and fragility. They investigate the trajectory of international and prevention efforts, and the development of country-level responses to reports of sexual and gender-based violence in these various conflict situations. The book explains how and why these responses were mobilised in response to reports and considers the conditions for effective reporting in real time considering the patterns and the structural root causes of the violence.