Feminist Commitments Towards a Horizontal Women, Peace, and Security Critical Learning Community

Abstract

This paper features the process whereby an experimental Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) program fostered a critical learning community around peace and security across 13 countries and with 40 women. It addresses the epistemological questions of doing research in collective ways (with and among activists/scholars), the axiological challenge of recognizing and embracing counter-expertise, and the possibilities for incorporating values and practices of care as well as non-extractivism in producing and disseminating knowledge. By articulating the core ethical principles that emerged from this experience, the paper suggests a critical feminist epistemological commitment in taking seriously grassroots women's knowledge in peace and security processes, rather than what is often done in both policy and academy: prescribing their needs from above, interpreting their knowledge from the outside, and advising what problems to tackle and how to live.

Mapping Grassroot Women’s Representations in Academic Research on the Women, Peace and Security Agenda in the Global South

“…), power differences among research subjects and relationships, researcher's authority over research subjects, and their own positionalities (Ackerly & True, 2008). Based on critical feminist epistemology, Luttrell-Rowland et al (2023) reveal the problems of knowledge production on peacebuilding and WPS due to the exploitation of power hierarchies where (1) the relationships between academics and research subjects are extractive and (2) academic knowledge is favored over lived experiences. They suggest committing to a critical feminist epistemology that enables serious consideration of grassroots women's knowledge in peace and security studies rather than "prescribing their needs from above, interpreting their knowledge from the outside, and advising what problems to tackle and how to live" (Luttrell-Rowland et al, 2023, p.1).…”

“…Despite the production of UNSCR 1325 and a large body of literature on WPS that discusses the importance of women's participation in peacebuilding, security, and conflict resolution, Luttrell-Rowland et al (2023) take a dig at the lack of constitutive knowledge produced through everyday lived experiences of women, and criticize that women are considered as objects of academic literature. They say that "rather than active producers of knowledge and innovation, they [women] become "practitioners" whose work is analyzed according to expert categories developed in disconnection from their lived realities" (Luttrell-Rowland et al, 2023, p.3).…”