The gender-resilience nexus in peacebuilding: the quest for sustainable peace

Abstract

Resilience and gender have become new buzzwords for expressing renewal in peacebuilding. This article unpacks the gender-resilience nexus in theory and analyses global trends and variation in peacebuilding policy and practice. It advances an analytical framework based on three central pillars of peacebuilding: process, outcome, and expertise. A comprehensive analysis of 49 international peacebuilding handbooks, produced by leading international organisations for policymakers and practitioners in the field, is conducted. The results show how the integration of the gender-resilience nexus signals new ways of understanding conflict dynamics and peacebuilding. Yet, gender peace expertise is 'thin' with regard to policies and practices of resilient conflict transformation. By way of conclusion, we suggest three directions to be taken in research to advance and refine the gender-resilience nexus. First, the politics and contestation of peacebuilding need to be problematised and explored further. Second, the understanding of resilience in peacebuilding needs to shift emphasis from conflict management to conflict transformation. Third, the positionality of peacebuilding actors and local contexts need to be probed further.

Resilience, gender, and conflict: thinking about resilience in a multidimensional way

“…Her study of how the Pathways for Peace agenda and the UN Environment Programme frame natural resource management finds that in their quest to facilitating 'resilience' to conflict, these programmes tend to reproduce gendered and racialised assumptions about whose capacity to build and whose knowledge counts. This also echoes findings of Aggestam and Eitrem Holmgren (2022) regarding gender peace expertise and the way it is articulated in international peacebuilding handbooks. Discourses of resilience also introduce new challenges by localising both the problem (bad resource management, conflict, gender inequality, marginalisation) and the solutions imparted.…”

“…Understood as transformation, resilience thus resonates with the idea of gender mainstreaming whereby this process entails 'the transformation of discriminatory social institutions such as laws, cultural norms and practices that limit women's access to rights and opportunities' (UNFCCC cited in Rothe 2017: 43). The emphasis on (conflict) transformation might explain why practitioners advocating for gender equality have increasingly adopted the discourse of resilience and why we have seen a gradual convergence between the programmatic agendas of UNSCR 1325 and resilience-building approaches in peacebuilding (see also Aggestam and Eitrem Holmgren 2022).…”

“…Both articles find that the adoption of a resilience perspective by international agencies and donors is potentially transformative but that this promise has failed to fully materialise. For instance, Aggestam and Eitrem Holmgren (2022) seek to evaluate the extent to which the gender-resilience nexus advances a transformative notion of peacebuilding. The authors argue that the confluence between the resilience turn and the WPS agenda at the international level has been made possible due to the affinities between the two discourses in relation to the outcome desired (sustainable peace); their focus on bottom-up, inclusive and adaptive processes; and their reliance on technocratic practices such as gender mainstreaming and capacity building.…”

“…In their comprehensive study of international handbooks on peacebuilding produced by the UN, the EU, the African Union (AU) and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Aggestam and Eitrem Holmgren (2022) find some potentially transformative aspects associated with the gender-resilience nexus, for instance, in relation to the need to adopt a non-linear and systems-wide approach to conflict analysis and the need for inclusivity and locally-informed approaches to sustainable peace. Yet, some of these handbooks still maintain an essentialist understanding of women, a focus on descriptive representation of women, and an overtly technocratic understanding of what constitutes expertise on gender-sensitive peacebuilding.…”

“…While gender inequality and gendered norms constrain the range of women's responses to conflicts and crises, there is still room for agency in the form of adaptation or resistance as illustrated by some of the articles (see Gitau 2022;Berry 2022). On the other hand, the Special Issue offers a variety of feminist attempts to understand, in a contextualised and critical way, the way gender relations are shaped and re-shaped by the emergence and diffusion of international discourses of resilience (see Aggestam and Eitrem Holmgren 2022) and the extent to which these discourses are adopted, adapted or resisted at the local level (Berry 2022;Bargués-Pedreny and Martin de Almagro 2022;Ryan 2022). In this way, the contributions to the Special Issue seek to capture the impact of resilience discourses at different levels (global, national, local) and responses to them from a gender perspective.…”