Conceptualizations of post-conflict agency have been widely debated in feminist security studies and critical international relations studies. This article distinguishes between three feminist approaches to post-conflict agency: narrative of return, representations of agency and local agency. It argues that all these approaches in distinct ways emphasize a modality of agency as resistance. To offer a more encompassing account of post-conflict agency the article engages Saba Mahmood’s (2012) critique of the modality of agency in feminist theory and her decoupling of agency from resistance. The article explores experiences of women who fought in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in Nepal. It focuses on ‘withdrawing from politics’, a dynamic whereby women ex-fighters move away from party activities and the public sphere, and rearticulates this withdrawing as a location of political agency. The article argues that being an ‘ex-PLA’ emerges as a form of subjectivity that is crafted through experiencing war and encountering peacebuilding, enabling a production of heterogeneous modalities of agency in the post-conflict context. By examining these modalities, the article challenges us to rethink post-conflict agency beyond the capacity to subvert regulatory gender norms and/or discourses of liberal peace.
This article asks: why do communities located at the periphery of the global security market continue to participate, even when they gain the least economically and politically? To answer this, we explore how militarism—an affectively felt logic that understands military service as desirable and/or inevitable—manifests through both affective relations and colonial structures. We focus on Gurkha communities in Nepal with a colonial military heritage of two hundred years with the British. Feminist and postcolonial research on militaries has demonstrated how war and global insecurity is framed through gendered colonial economies and discursive logics, shaping military systems and subjects. Yet what remains underexplored is the affective dimension of how militarism operates within, and in relation to, militarized communities outside the “West” whose identities and material conditions are structured through colonial histories. To address this gap, we operationalize Lauren Berlant's (2011) concept of cruel optimism to capture why these communities stay attached to militarism when the costs abound. We argue that militarism within the Gurkha context is both affectively felt and structurally experienced in such a way that it renders a military pathway to a good life as natural and desirable, despite evidence of the fragility and impossibility of pursuing this path.
This article examines the construction of gender agendas in left-wing populist movements that mobilise for armed struggle, by focusing on the case of the Maoist movement in Nepal. Feminist scholarship has highlighted how left-wing populism, when appealing to a generalized "people", tend to produce homogenizing discourses that erase inequalities and difference, even when such movements integrate a gender dimension. Examining the trajectory of the Maoist movement over time, we argue that this 'sameness' may become contested and utilized by women participating in the lower echelons of the movement, as the political reality shifts from conflict to post-conflict context. As our main contribution, we develop a bi-directional approach that employs the concept of collective identity and allows us to examine the construction of populist agendas as a two-way interaction between the leadership of a movement and its grass roots supporters. Through this approach we show how the gender dimension was not merely a bi-product but central to both the construction of the Maoist movement's war time 'progressive' identity, and the fragmentation of this identity and the movement's populist appeal in the post-conflict context.
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