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This article explores the encounter between the Women, Peace and Security agenda and rebel institutions in Mindanao. The analysis highlights that activities aiming to support women’s participation in peacebuilding often exist in parallel with and fail to fully recognise women’s existing forms of mobilisation within Non-State Armed Groups. This gap is bridged by civil society brokers who are associated with armed groups but speak the language of international peacebuilding frameworks. The findings point to the important role of such intermediaries in translating international norms, and to rebel groups and institutions as arenas for women’s political mobilisation and empowerment.

For decades, women in and from Myanmar have engaged in documentation of human rights abuses by the Myanmar military, report writing and international advocacy campaigns as key strategies in pursuit of political change. Approaching these practices of knowledge production as expressions of narrative agency, this chapter examines how bearing witness has allowed women from marginalized ethnic minority communities to gain significant influence. It traces the evolution of human rights documentation targeting international audiences as a key strategy for the Burmese women’s movement in exile, and explores the politics of how narratives about violence and human right abuses are produced, circulated, silenced and heard. The chapter notes that constraints regarding which narratives can be heard and amplified in an international political context have led to an emphasis on conflict-related sexual violence at the expense of more complex narratives of structural gendered violence and insecurity. Further, after the onset of a political reform period in Myanmar in 2011, the interest of international actors shifted towards collaboration with government, which made them less receptive to oppositional narratives of still ongoing, state-sponsored human rights abuses. This demonstrates the sensitivity of women’s narrative agency to geopolitical shifts and changes in the international politics of aid.

International peacebuilding paradigms represent women’s organizations as important peacebuilding partners. However, most conflict-affected states are authoritarian or hybrid regimes, where women’s peacebuilding work may be associated with both difficulties and danger. While feminist peacebuilding scholarship has focused its critique on the frictional encounters between local women’s organizations and international liberal peacebuilding, it has not sufficiently explored how women’s peacebuilding practices are shaped by authoritarian state policies. Bringing together feminist work on friction in global-local encounters and work on civil society-state relations in non-democratic settings, we argue that friction is manifested as tensions and conflicts in several relationships. Drawing on interviews with women activists in and from Sri Lanka and Myanmar, this article examines how women’s organizations negotiate the constraints and pressures emerging from their relationships with international peacebuilding partners and donors, as well as with state authorities. Women’s organizations engage in a delicate balancing act to navigate state tactics of repression, co-optation and legitimation, and this precarious position is often further complicated by the practices and norms of international peacebuilders. Exploring these multidimensional frictional dynamics, the article contributes to a fuller understanding of the political conditions that shape the peacebuilding practices of women’s organizations and the ways in which they mobilize to navigate these conditions.

This article explores the political space of the border through the experiences of Myanmar women activists, for whom the borderlands in Thailand have provided refuge as well as a conducive environment for political mobilization. At the same time, the border renders refugee activists insecure and precarious. Drawing on life history interviews, our analysis expands conceptualizations of the border as a dynamic political space by illustrating its dual capacity to both facilitate and constrain the political agency of refugee women from Myanmar. In particular, the spatial and temporal fluidity and in-betweenness of the border is shown to foster both repression and resistance. Exploring the character and salience of the border as a space for activism over time, we demonstrate how the political space of the border is relational, constituted in interaction with other political spaces, such as politics and governance in Myanmar, transnational activist networks, and the politics of international aid. 

In recent years, liberal peacebuilding has been increasingly displaced by illiberal peacebuilding – illiberal norms and practices that prioritise regime control, stability, and order through economic co-optation, repression of dissent, and the promotion of hegemonic narratives. While studies have examined how illiberal peacebuilding is practiced in various contexts, few have thus far asked how people respond to, and possibly resist, illiberal ideas and practices of peacebuilding. Rather, the existing research on resistance and peacebuilding has primarily focused on local resistance to top-down, often internationally driven liberal peacebuilding. In this article, we address this gap by bringing resistance studies and peacebuilding into greater dialogue and by exploring civil society resistance to illiberal peacebuilding in Myanmar and Sri Lanka. We examine how civil society and social movement actors have resisted regime efforts to build peace through illiberal norms and practices and instead worked to imagine and construct alternative forms of peace that are more inclusive and egalitarian, though not necessarily liberal.

Conventional assumptions locating peacebuilding temporally after violence have largely prevented exploration of how peacebuilding is practised amidst conditions of ongoing violence and insecurity. This chapter discusses the concept of women-to-women diplomacy as a framework which captures women's peacebuilding practices during, after, and alongside armed conflict. Drawing on a case study of the multi-ethnic alliance Women's League of Burma (WLB) from Myanmar, the chapter proposes that women-to-women diplomacy is a distinct type of peacebuilding by women grounded in a commitment to gender justice as an intrinsic aspect of a legitimate and sustainable peace. Embracing such a peacebuilding approach, WLB has contributed to transforming conflict divides long before the initiation of formal national peace negotiations in Myanmar. This chapter reveals how practices of women-to-women diplomacy are deployed, adapted, and modified in relation to changing conflict dynamics and offers an analytical framework to analyze women's peacebuilding practices in other political landscapes and in various stages of armed conflict.

Hur kan politik studeras i en tid där styrning kommit att handla om att hitta rätta lösningar på förgivettagna problem? I denna artikel argumenterar vi för governmentality som ett användbart perspektiv för att analysera makt och fånga ”det politiska” i politik och styrning. Utifrån exempel från vår forskning belyser vi hur governmentality-perspektivet kan synliggöra hur två till synes obestridligt goda mål, trygghet och jämställdhet, opererar som styrningsverktyg som bidrar till att dölja motsättningar och motstridiga intressen. Governmentality-perspektivet erbjuder en användbar analytisk verktygslåda för att undersöka hur politiska problem görs styrbara samt hur styrningen legitimeras och görs begriplig. Perspektivet gör det också möjligt att synliggöra den ofta outtalade problemförståelse som ligger bakom olika sätt att angripa politiska problem. Detta perspektiv öppnar således upp för analytiska frågor som vi ser som helt centrala för statsvetenskaplig forskning i en tid som präglas av en utbredd avpolitisering av i grunden politiska problem som exempelvis jämställdhet och trygghet

How can politics be critically explored, at a time when governing is increasingly seen as a matter of technical problem-solving? In this article, we argue that a governmentality perspective provides a fruitful analytical approach for capturing power and the political in processes and practices of governing. Drawing on our respective research, we highlight how two seemingly indisputable and desirable policy goals – safety and gender equality – operate as governing tools in ways that conceal political conflict and contestation. A governmentality perspective offers a useful analytical toolbox for exploring how political problems are constructed and rendered governable, and how governing practices are legitimated as a particular problem representation is naturalized. This analytical approach thus draws attention to questions of particular relevance in an era of post-politics and widespread de-politicization of fundamentally political issues, such as safety or gender equality.

What strategies can be employed to conceptualize peace? In recent years, scholars have introduced an impressive array of “peace with adjectives” in order to make sense of some of the normative and empirical underpinnings of peace. Negative, positive, everyday, virtual, illiberal, partial, insecure, relational, emancipatory, agonistic, and feminist are some of the qualifiers that have been associated with the concept. While the growing attention to conceptualization is a welcomed development, we argue that the proliferation of new terms has led to increased fragmentation in the field of peace studies. Conceptual fragmentation impedes cumulative knowledge production and generates missed opportunities for fruitful discussions across theoretical and conceptual divides. In this article, we aim to provide more clarity to our field by mapping existing peace conceptualizations and identifying the strategies employed by scholars to construct innovative new terms. In our review, we identify 61 concepts and suggest that these conceptual innovations in peace research belong to one of three analytical strategies: developing diminished subtypes, conceptual narrowing, and conceptual expansion. Building on this categorization, we make recommendations for how peace researchers can enhance clarity and deepen constructive discussions between different conceptual approaches.

¿Qué estrategias se pueden utilizar para conceptualizar la paz? En los últimos años, los académicos han presentado una impresionante variedad de «paz acompañada de adjetivos» con el fin de dar sentido a algunos de los fundamentos normativos y empíricos de la paz. Algunos de los calificativos que se han asociado al concepto han sido: negativa, positiva, cotidiana, virtual, iliberal, parcial, insegura, relacional, emancipatoria, agonística y feminista. Si bien la creciente atención que se está prestando a la conceptualización es un desarrollo bienvenido, argumentamos que la proliferación de nuevos términos ha provocado una mayor fragmentación en el campo de los estudios de la paz. La fragmentación conceptual impide la producción acumulativa de conocimiento y provoca que se pierdan oportunidades para generar debates fructíferos a través de las divisiones teóricas y conceptuales. En este artículo pretendemos aportar más claridad a nuestro campo mediante el mapeo de las conceptualizaciones de paz existentes y la identificación de las estrategias que utilizan los académicos para construir nuevos términos innovadores. En nuestra revisión, identificamos 61 conceptos y sugerimos que estas innovaciones conceptuales dentro de la investigación en materia de la paz pertenecen a una de entre tres posibles estrategias analíticas: desarrollo de subtipos disminuidos, contracción conceptual y expansión conceptual. Partiendo de esta categorización, hacemos recomendaciones sobre cómo los investigadores en el campo de la paz pueden lograr una mejora con relación a la claridad y profundizar en los debates constructivos que se generan entre los diferentes enfoques conceptuales.

Quelles stratégies employer pour conceptualiser la paix ? Ces dernières années, les chercheurs ont introduit un éventail impressionnant de « paix avec adjectifs » afin de faire sens de certains fondements normatifs et empiriques de la paix. Négative, positive, quotidienne, virtuelle, illibérale, partielle, précaire, relationnelle, émancipatrice, agnostique, féministe… Tous ces mots ont été employés pour qualifier ce concept. Bien que l'attention croissante à la conceptualisation soit une évolution bienvenue, nous affirmons que la prolifération de nouveaux termes a engendré une fragmentation croissante du domaine des études sur la paix. La fragmentation conceptuelle entrave la production de connaissances cumulatives et crée des occasions manquées de discussions productives par delà les divisions théoriques et conceptuelles. Dans cet article, nous cherchons à contribuer à plus de clarté dans notre domaine en retraçant les conceptualisations existantes de la paix et en identifiant les stratégies employées par les chercheurs pour créer de nouveaux termes innovants. Notre revue de la littérature identifie 61 concepts et suggère que ces innovations conceptuelles dans la recherche sur la paix appartiennent à l'une des trois stratégies analytiques suivantes : le développement de sous-types 'diminués', le rétrécissement conceptuel et l'expansion conceptuelle. En nous appuyant sur cette catégorisation, nous émettons des recommandations pour aider les chercheurs à être plus clairs et à approfondir les discussions constructives entre différentes approches conceptuelles.

Gender inequalities have persisted across macro-political changes in Myanmar. The decade of reforms provided more opportunities for women, but the 2021 military coup reinstated an almost exclusively male-dominated decision-making structure in the country. While Myanmar is home to numerous ethnic groups with diverse cultures, norms and traditions, the work of women activists and scholars has revealed widespread patterns of discrimination against women. Notably, this reality contrasts sharply with a popular official rhetoric about Burmese women’s ‘inherent equality’ with men – a narrative that has arguably done more to bolster the legitimacy of Myanmar’s governments than to improve women’s lives. This chapter provides an analysis of change and continuity in terms of both opportunities and challenges for realising women’s equality in Myanmar. Taking the situation of women during military rule before 2011 as a starting point, the analysis next moves on to exploring women’s experiences of the transition and their attempts at leveraging political openings for gender equality under the NLD government. We then explore the effects of the 2021 military coup on women, before concluding with a discussion of future challenges and opportunities for women’s rights in Myanmar.