Karie Cross Riddle, PhD

Critical Feminist Justpeace: Grounding Theory in Grassroots Praxis (currently under review)

Feminist scholars of International Relations will be very familiar with the Women, Peace, and Security agenda, which mainstreams gendered concerns in international peace and security work. However, the WPS agenda is not appropriate for every context. How can transnational feminists support women's peacebuilding work in all places, via alternatives to the agenda?

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Drawing from fieldwork in Northeastern India, particularly in the state of Manipur, I propose the theory of critical feminist justpeace. This theory of change uses women's peacebuilding praxis across ethnic and religious difference to reformulate John Paul Lederach's conflict transformation approach. The theory proposes the following goals and processes:

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Goals
(1) Justice includes the protection of individual and group rights, restitution for wrongs, and the production of intersectionally equitable societies and economies.
(2) Peace is positive; it promotes flourishing across a lifetime. The pursuit of peace involves targeting both direct and structural sources of violence in public and private spaces. The substance of peace includes nonviolent relations with others and the means for internal peace.

Processes
(1) Retain an intersectional consciousness regarding people’s participation in initiatives for peace, whether public meetings or private discussions within homes; and pay particular attention to the participation of those who have been historically sidelined from peace initiatives.
(2) Analyze economic, social, cultural, and political relationships for hierarchies of power, and seek to transform those hierarchies to produce intersectionally-equitable processes.
(3) Investigate how power works through norms, systems, and structures.

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I discuss this research on the Global Tides podcast (joined by my honors thesis advisee, William Bacon) here.