Date: Wednesday 30 September 2009
Time: 5-6.30pm
Venue: Old Theatre, Old Building
Speaker: Professor Amina Mama
Discussant: Dr Marsha Henry
Chair: Professor Kimberly Hutchings

This lecture will explore what a feminist perspective on militarism offers the theorisation of development and underdevelopment. It will highlight some of the ways in which the heavily gendered and hierarchical technologies of power that are the defining features of militarism and military rule have sabotaged longstanding struggles for democratisation and development. It is argued that where contemporary conflicts have been characterised by high levels of civilian casualties and abuse of women, so provoking new levels of gender consciousness and women's more visible involvement in peace activism. The challenges of strengthening women's peace activism into more concerted feminist anti-militarist activism are considered in the context of current policy discourses.

Amina Mama is Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair on Women's Leadership at Mills College. Prior to this appointment she spent almost a decade as the first Chair in Gender Studies at the African Gender Institute, University of Cape Town, South Africa, where she lectured, initiated the transdisciplinary graduate programme in Gender Studies, and carried out a series of regional intellectual capacity development and publication projects in the field of gender studies. Notable among these are continental networking and capacity development initiative 'Strengthening Gender Studies for Africa's Transformation', which supports the growing feminist scholarly network and hosts the Gender and Women's Studies in Africa website. She is a founding editor of the first continental academic gender studies journal 'Feminist Africa', established in 2002.

In the last decade she has carried out several collaborative research projects in the area of gender and politics, sexuality and higher education. These include Mapping African Sexualities (in collaboration with Takyiwaa Manuh, University of Ghana and supported by Ford Foundation) and Gender and Institutional Culture in African Universities (in collaboration with Teresa Barnes, University of the Western Cape, supported by the Association of African Universities). She is currently developing new work on the gender politics of militarism, conflict and peace-building and transnational feminism.

Marsha Henry is lecturer in gender, development and globalisation at LSE's Gender Institute.

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