This paper examines insurgent citizenship practices employed by activists in the exiled Burmese women's movement from the 1990s and onwards. Consisting of political exiles, refugees and ethnic insurgents, this movement has successfully used the transnational, transitory space of the borderlands to constitute its participants as political subjects with legitimate claims to rights, citizenship and leadership. Drawing on interviews, this analysis interrogates women's activism through the lens of insurgent citizenship practices. Thus, how have Burmese women's activists claimed rights and lived citizenship in exile? Three main strategies are examined: firstly, women activists have positioned themselves as political actors and authorities through involvement in governance and humanitarian aid delivery in refugee camps. Secondly, they have claimed rights and political subjectivity through engagement with international norms, networks and arenas. Thirdly, they have claimed citizenship and political influence in oppositional nation-making projects through engaging with and negotiating ethno-nationalist armed struggles. The analysis highlights the multifaceted nature of women's insurgent citizenship practices, showing how they navigate multiple marginalized subject positions, direct their rights claims towards multiple governing authorities, and enact multiple political communities.

Gender-equality work in Sweden is increasingly carried out by private consultancy firms. In this article, we explore the rationalities that govern Swedish market-based gender-equality policy through an analysis of the subject positions that are made available to gender-equality consultants. The article is an adapted version of our published work in Swedish. We analyse what types of agency these positions enable and preclude, as well as how they shape the meaning of gender equality and the content of gender-equality work. While market logics constrain the space for critical analysis and cause gender equality to be subordinated to other goals, consultants nevertheless find ways to resist these tendencies in pursuit of transformative change.

Feminist scholars have convincingly demonstrated how militarism and nationalism rely on the (re)production of gendered hierarchies. As a result, feminism is often assumed to be at odds with these political projects. In this article, we demonstrate that this is not always and not necessarily the case: in contrast, militarized nationalism may even constitute fertile ground for the mobilization of feminist organization and activism. We make this argument drawing on an in-depth case study of the emergence and evolution of an exiled Burmese women's movement from within armed ethno-nationalist struggles in the borderlands of Myanmar. Drawing on interviews with women activists, we examine when and how militarized nationalism can provide a space from which feminist agendas can be articulated and successfully pursued. This case demonstrates that militarized nationalism does not only have the potential to mobilize women's participation, but can provide a platform for feminist organization and activism that transcends, challenges, and eventually reshapes militarized nationalist projects in ways that advance women's rights and equality. These findings call into question generalized assumptions about the conflictual relationship between feminism, militarism and nationalism, and contributes to advance feminist debates about women's mobilization in contexts of armed conflicts and nationalist struggles.

For decades, peace and conflict studies have devoted more attention to conflict than to peace, and despiteits centrality, peace itself has been under-conceptualized. In this paper, we propose a theoretical frameworkand methodologies to make peace beyond the absence of war researchable. The framework is designed to capture varieties of peace between and beyond dichotomous conceptions of positive versus negative peace, or successful versus failed peace processes. To capture the complexity of peace in its empirical diversity, our framework approaches peace in three different ways: as a situation or condition in a particular locality; as a web of relationships; and as ideas or discourses about what peace is or should be. These approaches provide different avenues for researching peace, and taken together they provide a fuller picture of what peace is, how it is manifested, experienced, and understood. We argue that this framework provides a way forward in advancing conceptual understandings and empirical analyses of peace that can facilitate systematic, comparative, qualitative analyses while at the same time accounting for the complex, multifaceted nature of peace.

The initiation of political reforms and a peace process in Myanmar has fundamentally altered the conditions for Burmese diasporic politics, and diaspora groups that have mobilized in Myanmar’s neighbouring countries are beginning to return. This article explores how return to Myanmar is debated within the Burmese women’s movement, a significant and internationally renowned segment of the Burmese diaspora. Does return represent the fulfilment of diasporic dreams; a pragmatic choice in response to less than ideal circumstances; or a threat to the very identity and the feminist politics of the women’s movement? Contrasting these competing perspectives, the analysis offers insights into the ongoing negotiations and difficult choices involved in return, and reveals the process of return as highly conflictual and contentious. In particular, the analysis sheds light on the gendered dimensions of diaspora activism and return, demonstrating how opportunities for women's activism are challenged, debated and reshaped in relation to return.

Millions of people in Asia live in refugee camps. Given this, what are the opportunities for political participation for refugees living in camps? This chapter addresses this question through an analysis of two refugee camp situations in Asia, in Thailand and Bangladesh. It examines how government policies, humanitarian aid practices, and forms of refugee mobilization and organization shape refugees' opportunities for political participation in these two contexts. The analysis of the cases demonstrates that while refugee camps are sites for repression and control, they can also become sites of resistance and political mobilization.

Sverige betraktas ofta, av andra liksom av sig själv, som ett av världens mest jämställda länder och hamnar också alltid i toppen av FN:s och OECD:s jämställdhetsrankingar. Sedan mitten av nittiotalet har jämställdhetsintegrering varit den officiella strategin för det svenska jämställdhetsarbetet, men trots detta startas det fortfarande projekt för att komma igång med detta arbete. I denna artikel problematiseras det svenska jämställdhetsarbetet mot bakgrund av politikens förändrade styrformer där marknadsstyrning i hög utsträckning kommit att dominera det offentliga och där «den rätta kunskapen» allt mer har kommit att ersätta politiska intressemotsättningar. Syftet är att utforska vad som händer med jämställdhetspolitikens innehåll när den inordnas i marknadsbaserade former för styrning och detta görs genom att studera jämställdhetskonsulters arbete. Det empiriska materialet består av elva telefonintervjuer med jämställdhetskonsulter, samt en genomgång av ett tjugotal konsultföretags hemsidor. Intervjuerna fokuserar hur intervjupersonerna upplevde arbetet som konsult; deras drivkrafter, motiv och argument; samt hur de såg på arbetets effekter, möjligheter och begränsningar. Materialet har analyserats med inspiration av governmentalityanalys och med ett särskilt fokus på hur jämställdhetskonsultens position samt jämställdhetsbegreppets betydelse konstrueras.

This entry focuses on women's situation in refugee camps for Rohingya refugees located in Eastern Bangladesh. It describes the persecution of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, and their situation as refugees in Bangladesh. In particular, the entry interrogates how humanitarian aid agencies work to address gender inequality and gender violence in the refugee camps. In humanitarian aid practice, violence against Rohingya women is primarily represented and approached as a symptom of religious and cultural backwardness that needs to be addressed through the modernization of refugee subjectivities, attitudes and beliefs. As this entry demonstrates, such approaches have generated conflicts and resistance from refugees, and sometimes obstructed rather than advanced struggles for refugee women's rights.

This chapter explores how violence against women is represented and approached in humanitarian aid to refugees. Drawing on an analysis of key humanitarian policy texts and case studies of efforts to address violence in refugee camps in Thailand and Bangladesh, the analysis demonstrates that a representation of violence against women as an expression of the 'underdevelopment' of refugee communities has gained prominence in humanitarian policy and practice. Consequently, changing the cultural norms and practices of refugees as to 'develop' them is seen as the main solution. However, this chapter shows that this approach has generated conflicts and resistance, and sometimes obstructed rather than advanced struggles for refugee women's rights.