This workshop is part of the ERC funded project Gendered Peace, a multi-disciplinary project led by Professor Christine Chinkin, that seeks a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the gender implications across the spectrum of peace and conflict in an effort to develop the theoretical foundations for a gendered international law of peace.
With the global promotion of a neoliberal growth-oriented paradigm, we have witnessed a trend of not only an increased privatisation of public sectors and services and deregulation, but also a further emphasis on separating the political and the economic in decision-making. These trends and their consequences have been made ever more evident through the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. But even prior to this pandemic, such trends have contributed to the deepening of inequalities, the occurrence and recurrence of various forms of violence, the near impossibility of recovering from violence, and the defining of peace in rather narrow terms. This has been the case despite the lived realities of people in conflict-affected societies showing that, aside of safety, the primary concerns are ensuring basic livelihoods, with many understanding the very notion of peace in terms of socioeconomic stability. Additionally, not only does conflict deepen inequalities, but inequalities in fact breed conflict in a mutually constitutive manner.
Political economic analysis can shed light on the false binary between political and economic factors, the existing linkages, and the historical continuity of inequalities in understanding both violence and peace. Feminist political economy in particular emphasises the relationships between the material details of everyday life and broader geopolitical and socio-economic structures and challenges the dichotomies of formal–informal economy, visible–invisible (or paid and unpaid) labour, public–private sphere, production–reproduction, capitalist–pre-capitalist, and human–non-human. In that direction, in the last couple of decades we have witnessed an increased attention to gender in the domain of political economy, both in terms of how women and men are differently affected by and differently affect political economy, and in terms of how masculinity and femininity produce and are produced by political economy.
With this in mind, feminist political economy is uniquely placed to examine the continuum of violence, the connections between different forms of violence and inequalities, and equally importantly, to imagine peace otherwise.
This workshop brings together people from different disciplines working on centring feminist political economy, broadly understood, in our gendered understandings of violence and peace. The key questions that will be explored include, but are not limited to:
- What is the relationship between gender, inclusive economies, and peace?
- How does the political economy of peace produce and is produced by notions of femininity and masculinity?
- How can we imagine peace otherwise through a feminist political economy perspective?
- How has feminist political economy historically engaged with peace and violence?
- What role could feminist political economy play in conflict prevention?
- What is the political economy of and around the UN Women, Peace and Security agenda?
- What is the relationship between extractive economies, peace, and justice
- What is the value of feminist political economic analysis of peace and violence in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic?
Follow us on Twitter @LSE_WPS for key reflections from the workshop.