A feminist opening of resilience: Elizabeth Grosz, Liberian Peace Huts and IR critiques

Abstract

While the United Nations (UN) and other international organisations have celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Women, Peace and Security agenda, critical scholars claim that the agenda has rarely been able to foster resilience. They show how programmes have only slowly and partially achieved gender balancing and parity in war-affected countries. The limitation we identify in the debate between policy and critique is that resilience has often been reduced to an egalitarian project—where mechanical policies and schemes are deployed to ameliorate the conditions of women, enhance their participation in decision-making and pursue the equality between women and men—to advance in sustaining peace. In this article we complement the existing critiques by engaging with the feminist writings of Elizabeth Grosz, as well as with indigenous feminist practices in Liberia. We nurture a feminism that affirms the agency and inventiveness of women to begin to reimagine resilience as difference: a resilience that thrives outside governance structures and the confines of neoliberal policymaking. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1057/s41268-022-00264-0.